Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  Fool me three times, and I’m probably in on the scam with you – or I am a fool.

James Cameron’s next project may well be a film about Hiroshima.  Sure, after the powerful show of solidarity he gave to our troops in the largely Oscar-free Avatar, you are probably thinking, “Hey, this will be a fair-minded project that shows that dropping the A-Bomb on Japan was a tough but necessary decision which ended up saving hundreds of thousands of American lives – and probably millions of Japanese.”

Pellegrino and Cameron

Surprise!  Instead, it promises to not only be another round of America-bashing but, moreover, one based on the work of a gentleman with a demonstrated track record of fraud and distortion.  Cameron’s long-time pal, Dr. Charles Pellegrino, wrote The Last Train from Hiroshima, the book that Cameron wants to turn into a movie.  It’s a shattering tale of horror told in part from the point of view of an American flyer who deeply regrets his participation.  There’s just one little problem with this important new addition to the historical canon – it seems to have been largely made up by the good doctor.  But, of course, Cameron would not be the King of the World if he let a little thing like rampant fraud get in the way of some gratuitous America-bashing.

So who is Charles Pellegrino - and I use the title “Doctor” here loosely, since this clown’s academic credentials are on par with Dr. Dre’s?   Well, for one thing he does not appear to be a PhD holder from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, as he has claimed.  At least, that was the finding of a reporter from The Telegraph.  Those wacky Brit newspapers and their reporters – going out and actually investigating and reporting instead of acting as unofficial stenographers for their favorite leftist subjects can turn up the darndest things!   (more…)

It’s hard to know what to make of a rich Hollywood mogul who announces that he “believe[s] in eco-terrorism” yet has a carbon footprint of his own that does to the environment what Godzilla did to Bambi.  As Pam Meister has pointed out here at Big Hollywood, it looks as though Cameron lives like a modern day rajah at his multi-mansion compound in Malibu and presides over an array of sprawling production facilities.  The greenest thing about this guy is the cash in his vault.

Now, it’s possible that his comment to Entertainment Weekly was just some off-the-cuff nonsense that just sort of slipped out.  That’s understandable.  Everyone says something mind-numbingly stupid once in a while.  Just ask Senator Coakley (D-MA).

You want to give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who, despite the freakin’ stupid  Avatar, made great movies like The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic and, of course, the moving Piranha 2: The Spawning.  The guy has what the hep kids today call “mad skillz.”  We really want his unbelievably dumb statement to be just an unbelievably dumb statement. (more…)

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner

“We will write our own future, and the future will be what we want it to be.” – Barack Obama

In a quiet and seemingly innocuous gesture, President Obama has designated 9/11 as “The National Day of Service and Remembrance.” Personally, I liked the ring of “Patriot Day,” and what does “service and remembrance” mean, precisely ? The idea is to get Americans to “engage in meaningful service to create change…in four key areas”: education, health, energy/environment and community renewal. None of these seems to have anything to do with honoring 9/11, but that seems to be the point: in the Huffington Post, Muslim-American playwright Wajahat Ali wrote, “In the US, we are trying to move away from focusing on 9/11 as a day of horror, and instead make it a day to recommit ourselves to national service.” An excellent Spectator article provides a blunter translation: “Nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.” Why? ”They think it needs to be taken back from the right.”

In other words, they resent the surge of patriotism and righteous outrage stirred up by the attacks, sentiments that empower the political Right. In order to advance the leftist agenda of dismantling American exceptionalism and recasting ourselves as the villain in our history books, they need Americans to put 9/11 behind us, forget the victims, forget that our enemy danced in the streets in celebration, forget that Islamic terror plots on our very shores continue to be disrupted, and forget that our rights and freedoms are under assault by a subversive civilizational jihad. (more…)