If you aren’t familiar with his work, he also wrote movies like The Untouchables, The Verdict and Glengarry Glen Ross.

His new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” elaborates on this journey, condemning the left in devastating fashion.

What happens to people who do such things?

My prediction is that Mamet, if he isn’t disowned by his industry already, will be.

The break will be ugly, but clean.

He will be dismissed as a bitter crank who probably sucked to begin with.

All those awesome plays and films once praised by critics and celebs will now be reassessed.

As crap.

Because Mamet abandoned group-think.

Overnight, he will turn from legendary to lackluster – whose attack on the left must be due to artistic suckiness.

Which is why Red Eye has started the David Mamet Attack Countdown, which monitors the days until a once glorified artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.

He is not, of course, but it won’t matter. He walked away from his tribe, and will suffer for it.

While our clock counts down to reputation annihilation, I beg you to buy his book.

I read it, and it reminded me of my own journey: an abandonment of phony, wrong-headed earnestness, coupled with a growing disgust for the toxic stupidity that is political correctness.

That he chooses America over his craft – requires that he now be trashed by those around him.

Which says more about them, than him.

The website Newsbusters points out the silliness behind the outrage – after all, President Bush has been depicted as far worse – he’s been portrayed as everything from a bloodsucking vampire in the Village Voice, to the Joker in Vanity Fair, to God forbid, a Republican- everywhere else. No one seemed to mind then. And while people like Bill Maher point out that Obama has been only at this job for six months (whereas Bush earned the bile over eight years) and therefore any criticism is unfair – that’s pure batpoop. Hatred for Bu$hitler began the moment he took office, and the vile lefties only knew Sarah Palin for a few weeks before they were wearing t-shirts with her face and a vulgar word (begins with ‘C’ and rhymes with bunt) beneath it.

And besides, if you ask me, this new Obama Joker face is pure street art that only elevates his hip persona. It’s no different than the Shepard Fairey ‘Hope’ poster, except it’s far more complimentary and honest. Seriously, we live in a culture where anti-heroes have replaced heroes, and we all know that Ledger’s Joker is far cooler than Bale’s Batman. (At least the Joker didn’t yell at his mom at the premiere.) The Joker scoffed at traditional values, reveled in post-modern humor and more important – was played by Heath Ledger, who’s dead! You can’t get any cooler than that, even if you add a Prince Albert and a nitrous addiction.

Finally, as so many Obamalovers point out, our President is more than a President, he’s a pop culture icon – and you can’t go more than five feet in Times Square without seeing a t-shirt, a button, or a jock strap with his face plastered on it.

At least with these new posters, the media has a message.

Also – a reminder for tonight: Mike Baker, Remi Spencer, Barret Swatek, and Ab News!

The Saul-like conversion of Mamet has produced reams of commentary from both the left and the right, but it is the reaction of the left that is especially interesting.  Many in the liberal “intelligentsia” have greeted the news by openly wondering whether such a political shift will result in the loss of Mamet’s famous creative powers.  A “depressed” Michael Billington, for one, writing in The Guardian, is fearful of what Mamet’s conversion portends for his work because, “the precedents for a shift to the right on the part of creative artists are not exactly encouraging.”

So how did Mamet come by his new conservative frame of mind?  The essay itself is fascinating, for it is that rarest of artifacts – the admission of an honest mind that it has been wrong about large and important things, and a frank embrace of what it once thought to be wrong.

Mamet tells us that while working on the political play November (which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York in early 2008 and starred Nathan Lane) he started thinking about politics – specifically, how politics manifested in the clash between his two protagonists, a president who holds a realist (conservative) world view, and his Utopian (liberal) minded speech writer.

Mamet began to realize that a large gulf existed between his long-held liberal beliefs and the real world which surrounded him.  For example, of the liberal aversion to business;

…I began to question my hatred for ‘the Corporations’ – the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

This is followed by an astonishingly mature re-evaluation of his views on the military;

…I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my  youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world.

Most interesting is Mamet’s realization that many of the reasons that he and other liberals had once lionized John F. Kennedy were some of the same reasons those same liberals detested George W. Bush!

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam.  Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago.  Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson.  Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

All of this is fascinating, but the question remains: Will Mamet’s conversion be followed by a loss of literary juice, as Billington and others feared?  Of course not, or at least, not necessarily.  The trope that one cannot be both creative and politically conservative is a vile myth, promulgated by snide liberals who fancy they have exclusive claim to the arts, a meme containing just as much validity as the one passed along by liberal professors that there aren’t more conservatives in academia because well, you know, you have to be smart to be a professor.

The reason liberal professors even say such things is because there is an undeniable dearth of conservatives in the academic establishment, so they come up with an explanation which elevates themselves while simultaneously degrading their political opposites. In so doing they fail to take into account other possible explanations for the discrepancy – differences in temperament, for example; differences in goals and values.

(It is not unlike, at bottom, the oft cited discrepancy between men and women’s pay – liberals are apt to see oppression in such statistics, completely ignoring what everybody outside of academia knows, that men and women choose, generally, different professions as a result of differing values and goals – family, flexibility, danger, etc.).

Can this be the answer to why there aren’t more conservatives in the arts?  Could conservative minded folk just value the arts less, or in a different way, than liberal minded folk?  Are we really talking about a difference in temperament?

Next week we will explore this possibility, and conclude the series.

Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters –Part one, two, three, four and five.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.