Even as HBO has been under attack from the right and left for Bill Maher’s misogyny, comes a reminder from writer/producer Aaron Sorkin that Time-Warner-CNN-HBO really, really doesn’t give a damn what viewers on the starboard side of the aisle think about the conglomerate. “Good move to alienate all the conservatives right away in the first episode,” Mickey Kaus quips at the Daily Caller, regarding West Wing producer Aaron Sorkin’s new series. “Get down to the core Hollysnob audience without wasting anyone’s time.”

And as John Nolte writes at Big Hollywood, “There’s nothing funnier than when liberals who venomously hate Republicans, like Aaron Sorkin, decide what it is we really believe.”

But isn’t this simply Bulworth: The Television Series? The premise is certainly the same as Warren Beatty’s 1998 movie, as seen in the above trailer.

Actually, Sorkin goes Bulworth one better. Inside of Sen. Bulworth, Beatty’s putative moderate Clinton-era Democrat, was an angry raging, bigoted hard leftist. Inside of Will McAvoy, the character portrayed by veteran actor Jeff Daniels, Sorkin’s self-proclaimed “registered Republican,” is an angry raging, bigoted leftist. Naturally, he’s obsessed with God and hurricanes:

“I’m a registered Republican, I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage.”

As opposed to Michael Moore and former DNC Chairman Don Fowler, both believing that Hurricane Gustav proved God was on the side of the Democrats when a hurricane caused the first day of the Republican National Convention to be cancelled in 2008. Or their fellow leftists who cheer hurricanes on purely for their destructive value.

While Daniels’ character has been compared to Keith Olberman, he might also be an unwitting portrait of the inner demons of another newsreader associated with NBC, albeit with slightly more self-control. Brian Williams was sold to the American public immediately after the presidential election in 2004 by Jeff Zucker, his then boss at NBC in 2004 with the words, “No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian.” Williams promptly started comparing the Founding Fathers to terrorists, and later off in search of Tea Party conspiracies, rather than reporting real news out of Washington.

There would be a great miniseries to be made from the stories of former liberals who’ve moved to the right, despite, in many cases, risks to their careers. It’s too bad HBO would never spring for it. But if they did, they could use as raw material the life stories, of, oh, I don’t know, David Horowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, or our own Roger L. Simon, et al. Or that Ronald Reagan fellow, who was a staunch FDR-supporter in his formative years. (Update: Or David Mamet, Dennis Miller, and other Hollywood figures who’ve come in from the cold.) But that would require both sympathy for an opposing point of view, and doing something pretty radical with a medium that’s long since been reactionary, and fearful of change.

Instead, HBO (and their sister network at Time-Warner, CNN) wants to go down with the ship, until we all have Roku boxes and cable modems, rather than cable television. Watch the rhetoric from those networks to become even more strident, as the icebergs loom ever larger.

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Back in October, we gave the president one cheer for having the nerve to deliver his then-latest malaise speech in the heart of the malaise itself — San Francisco, an area permanently trapped in 1970 at the intersection of Haight-Ashbury, Stonewall, Altamont and Earth Day.

Obama told the softest denizens of what Michael Barone once dubbed “Soft America” that “we” have lost our ambition:

“We have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge,” President Obama said at a fundraiser in San Francisco on Tuesday.

As I wrote at the time:

To be fair, let’s give Obama points for actually saying this in San Francisco, as it does take a certain amount of chutzpah to deliver your malaise speech in a city where they obviously have more important things to do than build and innovate. Though let’s take those points away; Obama is calling his leftwing base in San Francisco too soft; but also considers his fellow Democrats in Pennsylvania to be too bitter, religious, and heavily armed –  which “everybody knows is true,” the future president would subsequently add in his non-apology apology. (Victor Davis recently assembled “a tiny sampling” of those Americans “who have been on the receiving end of the president’s disdain.”)

While today’s self-described ‘progressives’ aren’t very good at building new things (just ask the president), they’ve become quite adept at destroying the monuments that the first generation of progressives built near the start of the 20th century:

First Elwha and Glines Canyon, and now Condit: The three largest dam removals ever in the country will be under way in Washington today, when contractors detonate 800 pounds of dynamite and blast the White Salmon River free.

“You hate to see it go; it’s good, carbon-free energy,” said Tom Hickey, senior engineer for hydro resources for PacifiCorp. But Condit Dam is only one of 47 projects in the company’s hydro fleet, Hickey said, and it has other sources of power from wind to coal.

Condit’s time simply had come.

However, when it comes to actually repairing things, as opposed to knocking them down, either rhetorically or literally, well, that apparently needs to be outsourced these days:

As a tourist, you might refer to the Bay Bridge as a spectacular sight; as a local, you will probably call it congested.

But embarrassing? Now that’s one adjective that doesn’t come to mind when you stare at one of the city’s prized landmarks.

However, a group of American manufacturers are calling it an embarrassment. The Alliance for American Manufacturing launched a new campaign, dubbed “Should Be Made in America,” pointing out all the ways in which the U.S. government is outsourcing infrastructure jobs that could go to the American people. The group’s first stop: San Francisco Bay Bridge.

“Our campaign is designed to spark changes in federal, state, and local procurement policies,” said Scott Paul, AAM’s executive director. “The problems with the Bay Bridge project could have been avoided if California officials had made it in America. Instead, the project is costing American jobs, undermining California’s environmental goals, and facing numerous delays.”

The group is not at all happy that Chinese steel is being used to repair the bridge, and has placed billboards near the bridge which might not play very well with either the area’s numerous Asian immigrants, nor the nation that seems to swooping up much of America’s massive amount of debt:

The billboards feature a bright red Chinese flag and say, “The Bay Bridge 100 percent foreign steel” and include the alliance’s website.

Paul said the alliance’s “Should Be Made in America” campaign is aimed at sparking changes in federal, state, and local procurement policies.

He said the U.S. needs to repair trillions of dollars in crumbling infrastructure over the next decade, including nearly $500 billion worth in California alone, and the campaign is arguing that the most effective boost to the U.S. economy would be to ensure that U.S. firms are given the work whenever permissible under existing trade obligations.

Paul said 20 U.S. states are currently considering, or have recently passed, legislation to provide preferences for American steel and manufactured goods in state-level procurement.

John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which helped coordinate funding for the Bay Bridge work, said the billboards have misleading information.

He said 76 percent of the steel used for the new eastern span was fabricated in the U.S.

Goodwin said the only portion using steel from China is the self-anchored suspension span, which is 2,047 feet long.

Goodwin said the main contractors for the eastern span are two American companies, Fluor, which is based in Texas, and American Bridge, which is based in Pennsylvania.

Still though, as a visual metaphor in an area whose leftwing politics have created a paralyzing stasis, it’s fun to watch. Especially when it’s attacking a nation that both Obama and Thomas Friedman (whose articles seem to anticipate much of Obama’s rhetoric) have praised as someone we should be both emulating and getting deeper into bed with.

As Steven Hayward of Power Line has written, Jimmy Carter’s original malaise speech was aimed at his fellow liberals’ “crisis of confidence,” just as Obama’s successor speech last year was delivered to his fellow bobos in arguably the bluest of blue state regions. Nowadays, as John Hawkins writes, sitting in at Hot Air, Obama’s current riff is that “you’re on your own” economics “is a sign of madness:”

According to the worst President in American history, “you’re on your own” economics, which apparently extended from the founding of the country until the day Barack Obama took office, didn’t work. Sure, it produced the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, the world’s largest economy, and made us into a super power, but that’s “madness” compared to Obamanomics, which cost us our AAA credit rating, has produced the longest streak of above 8% unemployment since the Great Depression, and is on track to produce 13 trillion dollars of debt over the next 10 years.

Ironically, “you’re on your own economics” once served the Bay Area pretty well:

President Obama lamented recently that Americans have “lost our ambition, our — our imagination, and — and — our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” There are at least two facts that must be pointed out here. First, the Golden Gate Bridge was built by private enterprise, not government. If anything, government was the biggest obstacle to the bridge, thanks to opposition from the Department of Defense and the mistaken opinion of a San Francisco city engineer that the ground under the bay to be spanned would never support such a structure. It’s also worth noting here that Bank of America founder and president A.P. Giannini, a member of the much-maligned one percent, stepped forward at a critical moment after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to provide critically needed private financing to complete the project. The bridge was finished in 1937, 16 years after architect Joseph Strauss first began the project. He completed the project $1.7 million under its total budget of $35 million.

Second, Obama is almost certainly correct in doubting that grand projects like the Golden Gate Bridge could be done today, but not for the reasons he would want to acknowledge. For proof, we need look no further than the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that TransCanada first proposed in 2008. The company wants to spend $7 billion in private capital to build the pipeline. It would transport crude oil produced in Canada’s Alberta tar sands region to refineries in Texas. Not only would U.S. dependence on OPEC nations for oil be significantly reduced, building the pipeline would also, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, create as many as 435,000 jobs in the U.S. by 2035.

It’s worked elsewhere as well:

Hoover Dam has become something of a liberal icon these days. President Obama points to it as an example of the sort of federally funded projects that once “unleashed all the potential in this country” — potential that his next round of stimulus will unleash again. MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow has pointed to the 726-foot-high, 660-foot-wide dam as proof that some projects are just too big for private enterprise. “You can’t be the guy that built this,” she tells the TV screen. Only government can, is the implication.

Well, that would come as a surprise to the guy who did build it – or, rather, the guys who did, with their private companies. In the five-year process they discovered, even back then, that the biggest obstacle they faced in Black Canyon wasn’t nature or the Great Depression, but New Deal Washington.

Couldn’t we a little more “on our own?” It seems to work pretty darn well, whenever it’s tried — right up until the moment when we’re not on our own.

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Here we go:

A couple who say they were forced to leave their home after director Spike Lee re-tweeted their address to his Twitter followers has hired the Morgan & Morgan law firm to represent them.

“At this point, they have retained us to protect their interests” and their safety, attorney Matt Morgan said of Elaine and David McClain, an elderly Sanford-area couple in their 70s.

The couple’s address was tweeted by a man who believed he had uncovered the address of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman who shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last month.

The problem is, the address does not belong to Zimmerman, but to the McClains, who have a son named William George Zimmerman who lived there in 1995 and still lives in Central Florida.

He is no relation to George Zimmerman, 28, who killed Trayvon on Feb. 26, sparking national outrage and international interest. Zimmerman has claimed self defense and has not been arrested.

After Lee’s retweet, the couple’s other son says, the McClains have been forced to flee their home and live in a hotel given the rapidly spreading threats of violence against the real Zimmerman.

Which dovetails with a post that Ace wrote earlier today, in language that likely wouldn’t be approved by the keepers of the bland institutional tones of the Orlando Sentinel:

If I were a c***s*cker, and advising that elderly couple that non-filmmaker Spike Lee endangered, I’d tell them to incur some costs.

Because you can’t have a lawsuit without costs. For one thing, you have to be able to show the costs you incurred due to your tortfeasor’s actions.

For another thing, it’s going to be hard to sell a claim of emotional duress if you just chillax at home. Like, you claim you feared for your life, but then you sit home and watch Matlock, same as before.

So if I were a real c***s*cker, advising these folks — I’m sorry, that’s offensive, I meant Person of C***s*cking — I would tell them “Go to a hotel and keep the receipt.”

As they did already.

Ace also links to a post by film/commercial maker Ladd Ehlinger Jr. on Lee. Ehlinger writes, “Lee once made movies about the dangers of the mob mentality.” Though based on interviews he did to promote Do The Right Thing, he seemed to advocate a violent mob when it suited his purposes; he would be far from the first the first on the left to do so. In case, as Ehlinger writes in 2012, Lee, “in a fit of pique,” seeks to drive that mob “and innocent people are having their lives ruined:”

These are the tactics of a bully that can’t shoot straight.

Twitter has seen fit to do nothing about this, even though this is a clear violation of its Terms of Service. The person who originally posted the erroneous information and got Spike Lee to retweet it, @maccapone, is also still on Twitter.

In case you missed it, here is the relevant Twitter rule:

You may not publish or post other people’s private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, street address or Social Security/National Identity numbers, without their express authorization and permission.

Someone should let Twitter know that Spike Lee and Marcus Higgins have been breaking their rules.

Rules are rules, Twitter. That one in particular has some wisdom to it. The question is, will you enforce it, despite Spike Lee’s fame, fortune, and connections to President Obama, or will you be an instrument of terror in the world? How many innocent bystanders will be forced to flee their homes and fear for their lives because of your corporate cowardice?

Or does Twitter condone this type of thuggery?

Ehlinger’s post is titled, “He’s Got to Have It.” And based on the article above from the Orlando Sentinel, he just may, in a court of law.

Meanwhile, Jim Treacher, responding to the plight of the McClains, the septuagenarian Florida teachers whose lives have been upended via Spike and other celebrity rabble-rousers adds:

Hey, if these two didn’t want to be intimidated and terrorized by an angry movie director and his online followers, they should’ve thought about that before they moved into the house where, 10 years later, somebody would think Zimmerman lived.

If you’re against vigilantes taking matters into their own hands, except when it comes to dealing with George Zimmerman, #YouMightBeALiberal.

I notice Spike hasn’t been working much lately. I hope he’s been saving his money. Lawyers can be expensive.

P.S. Of course, we shouldn’t rush to judgment on this until we know which one of Obama’s parents the McClains more closely resemble.

Actually, while Spike once declared that while the calendar would eventually be measured as “B.B.: Before Barack and A.B.: After Barack,”  based on this early 1990s quote, repeated today on the Popehat blog, he would be much less circumspect had he ever met Mr. Obama’s parents:

I don’t recall exactly when I concluded that Spike Lee is an asshole, but I think it was around the time he told Esquire “I give interracial couples a look. Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street.” I’ve long viewed hostility to interracial couples a reliable tell for self-involved douchebaggery, and now that I have a multiracial family my impression is only confirmed.

The Esquire quote is referenced in this 1993 L.A. Times article, which adds another charming statement by Lee:

“Black South Africans are gonna have to kill people. . . . That Gandhian (stuff) don’t work. They gotta start picking up guns. . . . I went to South Africa. I saw those little kids chanting, ‘One bullet, one settler.’ It’s gonna come to that. I’ll be rejoicing. Who knows? We might see the same tactic here some day.”

–Spike Lee, insights gleaned shooting “Malcolm X” (Esquire, Oct.).

Yesterday, Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

So far all that is clear is that there is a growing anger among African-Americans about a failure to immediately arrest the shooter that in turn is provoking an even greater backlash against the antics of Al Sharpton, the creepy bounty offered by the New Black Panther Party, and others who inflame for their own careerist advantage, and no one — not the president, not the media, not the civil rights leadership, not the politicians — seems willing or able to call for a time-out until all the facts are reviewed and released. We have collectively regressed to the days of Rodney King and the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson trial — or to something far worse. Hope and change came and went.

Arguably, Tinseltown has merely been standing still, having gone from the racism of D.W. Griffith to the racialism of Spike Lee in less than a century. For a big picture town, sometimes you sure need a microscope to measure cinematic progress.

Related: “MSNBC Dowdifies George Zimmerman to Make Him Sound Racist.”

Update (7:00 PM PDT): Amazing what the prospect of a lawsuit can do to focus the mind:

Or as Jonah Goldberg tweets in response, “Shorter @SpikeLee I meant to direct death threats and intimidation to someone else’s house. My bad.”

More: The Twitter Hall of Shame notes, “Lee just apologized for his retweet…But he still has not deleted the tweet with the McClains’ address” — and it is indeed still up as 0f 7:40 PM Pacific tonight. (Address redacted for obvious reasons):

And speaking of Twitter, as Dan Riehl writes at Big Journalism, a “Kill Zimmerman” account has been created, and as of the time of this post, also remains online, also in violation of Twitter’s rules.

Exit question: “Civility: Will Obama Return $1.6 Million Raised by Spike Lee?”

(Bumped to top.)

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Life imitates art — Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, a title now drenched in irony, ended with violent looters (led by the character played by Lee) destroying their favorite neighborhood pizza restaurant after a minor character in the film was killed by the police. In the wake of the MSM’s Trayvon Martin meltdown, Spike seems to determined to see this sort of scene played out in real life.

The Smoking Gun reports:

With Twitter and Facebook continuing to explode with posts purporting to contain the address of George Zimmerman, property records and interviews reveal that the home is actually the longtime residence of a married Florida couple, both in their 70s, who have no connection to the man who killed Trayvon Martin and are now living in fear due to erroneous reports about their connection to the shooter.

The mass dissemination of the address on Edgewater Circle in Sanford–the Florida city where Martin was shot to death last month–took flight last Friday when director Spike Lee retweeted a tweet containing Zimmerman’s purported address to his 240,000 followers.

The original tweet was sent to Lee (and numerous other celebrities like Will Smith, 50 Cent, and LeBron James) last Friday afternoon by Marcus Davonne Higgins, a 33-year-old Los Angeles man who uses the online handle “maccapone.” Higgins included the direction, “EVERYBODY REPOST THIS.”

* * * * * * *

The residence on Edgewater Circle is actually the home of David McClain, 72, and his wife Elaine, 70. The McClains, both of whom work for the Seminole County school system, have lived in the 1310-square-foot lakefront home for about a decade, records show.

In an interview tonight, Elaine McClain told TSG that she and her husband were “afraid” due to the online linking of her address to Zimmerman. “We’re keeping everything locked,” she said. McClain added that the couple was particularly unnerved by a letter mailed to them at their home. On the envelope, she said, were printed the words “Taste The Rainbow,” the slogan for Skittles. Martin was carrying a pack of Skittles and a can of ice tea when he was gunned down by Zimmerman.

McClain said her husband returned the envelope unopened to the post office.

The McClains only became aware that their address was being widely circulated online two days ago, when a TV reporter arrived at their home asking for “George.” Bewildered by their sudden–and erroneous–connection to Martin’s killer, the elderly couple’s distress can only be heightened by posts made by Twitter and Facebook users who threaten to visit their residence in search of Zimmerman. Or other posts that goad followers to vigilante action.

Back in 2006, the Weekly Standard noted that Lee may be the only superstar director whose name is anathema for marketing purposes:

Spike Lee, quite simply, is not a profitable director, and he hasn’t been for some time. His first two major motion pictures, School Daze and Do the Right Thing, were both produced for around $6.5 million. The first made more than double its budget domestically, and the second is his most profitable film to date (other than The Original Kings of Comedy, which owes its success far more to the standup comedians performing in it than the man behind the camera), with a domestic gross of $27.5 million. His winning streak continued for two more films: Jungle Fever made an $18.5 million profit, and Malcolm X brought home just over $14 million more than its budget. Since then, however, Lee hasn’t made a drama that ended up in the black. Some have been modest failures (Crooklyn, for example, lost only about $400,000). Others have been much bigger flops. (She Hate Me cost $8 million to produce and brought in less than $400,000 at the box office. Clockers lost even more money; the $25 million piece was almost $12 million in the red.)

The question becomes, then, how does one make a Spike Lee movie profitable? Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment is probably banking on the fact that white audiences are unlikely to attend what they imagine will be a two hour lesson on why society is racist. Removing the “Spike Lee Joint” tag from his picture will almost certainly increase its marketability at the box office with whites. It’s not too much of a stretch to guess that Inside Man might wind up as Lee’s highest grossing movie; his previous best is Malcolm X’s $48.4 million.

After the dust — and the lawsuits — settle, this could actually be the best thing to happen for Spike’s Hollywood employment. Hollywood can’t get enough radical chic, and the more loathed a star or in this case a star director is by Red State audiences, the more beloved he becomes within the Hollywood artistic compound. Or as John Nolte writes today at Big Hollywood regarding another far left star gone wild, if you live in flyover country, “while this might be reminder number 11,487 that Hollywood hates you, it’s reminder number 22,641 that Hollywood is driven by ideology not profits.”

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1967′s Bonnie & Clyde is explored in depth by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as kicking off the “New Hollywood” revolution of the 1970s. That era would last for approximately ten years, until George Lucas’s Star Wars finally delivered a movie with unambiguous good guys and — at last! — an unambiguously happy ending. For a while though, as leftwing author/JournoList member Rick Perlstein told Reason magazine back in 2008, out promoting his book Nixonland:

My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.

It was so fresh, that for a decade, Hollywood films (and those financed by Hollywood but shot in England and Europe) seemed to invariably end in two flavors, both of which were adored by cinéastes, but eventually wore out audiences:

1. Kill ‘em all, let Pauline Kael Sort It Out: Dr. Strangelove most spectacularly in 1964, followed later by the aforementioned Bonnie & Clyde, then Easy Riders, Peter Fonda’s later drive-in classic, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, plus Silent Running, Robin & Marian, Chinatown, and in their own ways, the first two Planet of the Apes movies. Even the James Bond franchise wasn’t immune at the time; his wife, played by Emma Peel herself, Diana Rigg, was machine-gunned B&C style at the conclusion of 1969′s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, George Lazenby’s sole outing as 007. (Mercifully. To paraphrase the anecdote that at least one Bond book reports, a critic told told producer Harry Saltzman at the time, “You made a mistake, Harry. You should have killed him, and kept her [Diana Rigg].”)

2. What in the Wide, Wide, World of Sports was That?! David Hemmings’ photographer character embracing the postmodern madness of the tennis “playing” mimes at the end of 1966′s Blowup, the ambiguous ending of The Graduate, 2001′s seeming head-scratcher, and the literal cliffhanger of the original Italian Job.

In a way, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather combined both of those formulas, with Michael Corleone ordering all of the rival Dons murdered in cold blood, followed by the door slamming on Diane Keaton at the end of the movie.

(Speaking of The Godfather, as Kathy Shaidle recently noted, Mario Puzo wrote its pulpy novel on commission from Paramount in the late 1960s to pay off some gambling debts. He invented most of the mafioso rituals depicted in the film, which later gangsters would adapt for themselves — “See, that’s how it’s done, boys!” This makes at least two Marlin Brando movies where what Tom Wolfe once dubbed “Information Ricochet” was at work. As Wolfe noted, Brando’s 1953 film The Wild One was an inspiration to nascent motorcycle gangs everywhere. This would be a topic that Roger Corman would return to in his 1960s biker flicks, which as Wolfe said, inspired the next generation of motorcycle gangs. Lather, rinse and repeat.)

In any case, the 1970s was the era of “A Cinema of Loneliness,” as lefty critic Robert Phillip Kolker titled his book on this genre of movies. The era of “Roll credits. Commence bumming,” James Lileks wrote in in 2007, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the film that for a time, replaced all of that. In 1977, George Lucas rediscovered the happy ending and became spectacularly wealthy along the way. Finally, Hollywood rediscovered, South Park “Underpants Gnomes” style, the formula for success:

1. Make films with appealing characters audiences want to spend two hours with.
2. Send the audience home with a happy ending, thus encouraging them to show up at the box office again, and tell their friends about the movie they just saw.
3. Profit!

This isn’t exactly rocket science — the entire industry knew this formula prior to the arrival of the Biskind’s Young Turks in the late 1960s. And from the 1980s through the 1990s, Hollywood printed money hand over fist, and every summer, we all went to say the latest movies starring Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Arnold, and Clint.

Then came Hollywood’s triple-whammy: their meltdown over Al Gore losing in 2000, Islamic terrorists causing 9/11, and America’s War on Terror. Suddenly, Hollywood reentered one of its phases where it decided it just didn’t like its American audience much anymore. And thus, the return to ambiguity. As historian Andrew Roberts writes — in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast/Newsweek shotgun wedding Website of all places — “Enough With the Cliffhangers! Movies Need a Cathartic Conclusion.” Roberts writes, “I have just been to my fourth movie in a month that has ended on a cliffhanger, and I want my money back:”

Now, there’s obviously a place in cinema for the cliffhanger ending, with the iconic 1969 heist movie The Italian Job standing as the classic of the genre, where a bus full of gold bars literally hangs from a cliff at the end, and the last words of the film are Michael Caine’s perkily cockney optimistic: “Hang on lads, I’ve got an idea.” Movies that are obviously going to have sequels—such as the Godzilla, X-Men, Halloween, Pirates of the Caribbean, Austin Powers, and Friday the 13th franchises—obviously require cliffhangers. But for four high-quality, nonfranchise movies in one month to end without any kind of genuine resolution—the last being the otherwise first-class Iranian film The Separation—is symptomatic of a deeper problem in our culture.

By not allowing good to triumph over evil in the last reel, filmmakers are engaging in a literally demoralized, postmodernist view of the world that denies a vital element of what cinema should be all about: catharsis. In our shilly-shallying, we-are-all-guilty, Obama Cairo Speech kind of way, we are short-changing the moviegoing public, which has the perfect right to see good behavior rewarded and bad behavior punished, as all the great filmmakers of the past, including the ones that enjoyed moral ambiguity like Alfred Hitchcock, perfectly understood.

That’s pretty rich, running in the successor to the magazine that told its readers at the beginning of 2009 that “We Are Socialists Now,” but to change Hollywood, the culture needs to first change. Then the industry will — or at least might — return to the unambiguous happy ending. It might even eliminate the liberal sucker punch as well someday, to further generate business the second week a movie’s at the box office.

OK, that last one may be asking for too much, but an older generation of Hollywood, before nihilism swept through the industry, once encouraged us to dream. (And not just of electric sheep.)

Or to put it all another way…Han Shot First! as Bill Whittle recently reminded us:

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Saturday Night Live, April 23rd, 1977:

Headline at Fox News, March 22nd, 2012, “California marijuana workers ready to unionize.”

Muggeridge’s Law states that there is no way for any satirist to improve upon real life for its pure absurdity — but sometimes it takes a while for the law to be enforced.

(H/T: Kate at Small Dead Animals, who pleads for California to be put out of its misery. Earlier thoughts on the glory days of SNL, here.)

Update: Welcome Mark Steyn readers clicking in from the Corner, with further examples of “Spirits of the Age.” Regarding our post, Mark writes wistfully on “The Golden State at twilight: half-stoner, half-teamster. Okay, that’s enough: As Ed Driscoll notes, satirists should be unionizing before the massive redundancies.”

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On January 19, 2011, during the height of the left’s brief “new civility” phase, CNN, which for 23 years had hosted a popular debate show called Crossfire (which featured crosshairs in its logo), had this embarrassing moment:

On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.

You know what kind of language CNN isn’t trying to get away from? Yesterday, this embarrassing moment occurred on the “news” network (Click over to the Daily Caller for video):

On “CNN Newsroom” Thursday afternoon, Drew Griffin of CNN’s special investigations unit used a racial slur while explaining phone call evidence from a recent case where the federal government charged three Mississippi men with a hate crime for running over a black man with a truck after severely beating him.

Griffin also compared the case to a shooting in Florida, where an unarmed black teenager was killed by a neighborhood watch leader.

“At the end of this, Deryl Dedmon is laughing with his friends and actually called on a cell phone and, pardon my language but there’s no other way to say this — ‘I just ran over that f—ing n*gger,’ that’s what he said. And it was a clear-cut case of pure racial-intent murder that took place there, which is why it was so easy to apply the hate crime legislation in this case,” Griffin said. “There was no question about it, unlike the circumstances involving the case in Florida.”

Why, it’s almost as if all of that “new tone” stuff last year was just so much opportunistic BS. There are other words that CNN considers acceptable as well. Yesterday, this embarrassing moment occurred on the “news” network:

CNN commentator Dean Obeidallah has some advice for politicians who are offended by gross and vile insults from comedians: “change the channel.”

Comedians like Bill Maher and Louis C.K. must have an “unfettered right” to spew their vitriol at politicians like Sarah Palin, insisted Obeidallah in a CNN.com op-ed. Such insults “come with the territory” of running for office, he told CNN host Brooke Baldwin on Thursday afternoon’s Newsroom. [Video at Newsbusters -- Ed]

Obeidallah believes there is a “war on comedy” stemming from outrage over crude and vile insults made by comedians like Bill Maher and Louis C.K. Concerned for the safety of America’s “proud tradition” of political satire, Obeidallah pleaded on CNN that “political comedy must be protected like political speech. It’s that important.”

However, in his column he trashed conservative Rush Limbaugh for attacking law student Sandra Fluke. So there should be a double-standard for entertainers who attack women politicians and those who attack regular women?

“Political comedians must be afforded the unfettered right to satirize our politicians – even if their jokes include crude words such as the ones that Maher and C.K. used about Sarah Palin,” wrote Obeidallah in his column titled “Stop the War on Comedy.”

“When you’re attacking a public figure, someone in politics, someone like Sarah Palin who would run to be a heartbeat away from the leader of the free world, you know what? It comes with the territory,” he stated on CNN Newsroom Thursday.

Since as an activist, Fluke is also a public figure — who is debating getting further into politics — then that double standard isn’t an issue. But Brian McKim and Traci Skene, the stand-up comics who publish Shecky magazine, have spotted another double-standard in Obeidallah’s essay:

On Saturday, CNN.com ran an essay from comedian Dean Obeidallah called “Stop the war on comedy.” It’s a garbled mess.

His inability to check his distaste for Limbaugh obviously clouds his ability to think or write clearly on this subject. It’s tough to do, but it’s necessary.

He eventually gets to what he believes to be the heart of the matter:

So, here is the big question: What exactly is the line that comedians are prohibited from breaching? What type of joke crosses from killing the crowd to killing your career?

To me, the answer depends on two factors. Are you a famous comedian? And what type of joke is it?

Say what?

Our response to the whole matter was to fight against those who would limit speech. Obeidallah seems to think that the way to deal with it is to concoct rules, parameters and qualifications.

This is questionable at best, frightening at worst.

Now, here’s the really scary part:

But to me, the more important factor in determining if a comedian — famous or not — has crossed the line of decency is to look at the subject matter of the joke.

While I absolutely support freedom of speech, comedians deserve to suffer consequences if they make hateful jokes about race, ethnicity, gender, religion or sexual orientation.

We would like everyone to read the bold portion of that sentence aloud. Take your time. Say it twice if you have to.

And savor the many implications.

A fellow comedian is say that we deserve to suffer consequences if we make hateful jokes about race, ethnicity, gender, religion or sexual orientation.

We don’t have to waste our time explaining just how reprehensible that statement is, do we? It speaks for itself, right?

Because hey, that’s how a rebel comedian sticks it to the man — by voluntarily submitting to his speech codes, and decreeing certain subjects off limits. Or as John Nolte writes at Big Hollywood, watching the print edition of the Onion go out of business in DC and Philadelphia (gee, you’d think they’d be able to find something to satirize about those dysfunctional cities, and the men who lead their governments):

If you look at the state of humor today, it’s in pretty bad shape overall. This neo-fascism called political correctness has made so many issues off-limits that comedians really only have a few choices anymore when it comes to the topics they choose.

You can either mock Republicans or tell sex jokes. Other than that…

And (other than the dirty words appendix in the back of the book) the Newspeak Dictionary gets smaller and smaller.

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At the Lifestyle blog, Dr. Helen writes:

I was watching the show House Hunters last night on HGTV and noticed that even with such a neutral show, in the space of ten minutes, I saw two commercials that were abusive to men. In one commercial, a woman was angry at a man at work and dumped a cup of coffee on him. In another, a man was in the grocery store aisle anxiously trying to decide whether his wife (or girlfriend) wanted the sweetener Stevia or real sugar. He was terrified that if he bought her sugar, she would be angry as she was off sugar that week but he was also afraid that she would get mad if he bought her artificial sugar as she would think he thought she was fat.

Another commercial showed a woman powerfully riding around on a lawn mower. I wish I could just peacefully watch a show without the constant message that says men are wimps, perverts, idiots,  or must live in constant fear of women and the simultaneous message that women are powerful. They climb big rocks while their boyfriend looks at them with admiration. Have you seen that Citi commercial?   These commercials may seem cute to some but they are destructive when they treat men as accessories to women rather than as human beings. Why not treat both sexes as worthy of some dignity?

Do you have a least favorite of these “males are idiots, predators, or wimps” commercials? If so, drop it in the comments as I am working on a section for my upcoming book on why men are on strike in the US and could use some tips.

In an unrelated — yet totally related — post at Big Hollywood, Christian Toto writes, “Cutting the Cord: Former TV Addict Goes All In for Streaming:”

Movies on cable required sitting through endless commercials. The few television shows I considered Must See TV weren’t on when I wanted them to be on. And even my cable system’s on-demand archive seemed limited. And then I had to stare at that ghastly cable bill, the one that seemed to loom larger with every passing month.

I decided to buy a new, Wi-Fi-enabled Blu-ray player a few months ago just to ponder what kind of entertainment choices I might have via streaming services. Turns out Netflix had all the shows my sons adore, from “Dinosaur Train” to “Curious George.”

My tag-team partner at Big Hollywood, John Nolte, reminded me that by supporting cable I indirectly kept channels I had little use for afloat. That inched me closer to my final decision.

Finally, I made the jump. No more cable.

So, what options do I have when I turn on my television now? I subscribe to Netflix and Hulu Plus for less than $20 a month for a bonanza of movie and TV content. I bought a subscription to MLB.tv to watch the Yankees and Rockies this summer. And I invested in a digital antenna for $50 – I probably could have shopped around for a cheaper model – to make sure I received the standard broadcast channels.

The Roku box awaits…

Also at the Lifestyle blog, before I forget, I have a lengthy post Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live finally coming to the Kindle, and the moment where the culture on TV began to change for the worse:

Once SNL took off though, the tone of network television would never be the same. If Bill Maher can call Sarah Palin a c*** with impunity, if Cee Lo Green can cheerfully sing a song titled “F*** You” at a Democratic Party fund raiser, well, the tone of the liberal overculture had to first be lowered from Leonard Bernstein on CBS’s Omnibus, Bob Hope hosting the Oscars, the swankiness of the Kennedy-era Rat Pack, and the Carson-era Tonight Show to get to that point. The original SNL was, in retrospect, one of the most powerful of the early battering rams in the New Left’s war on culture.

It was also, at its best, extremely funny during its first five years (though much more so than Monty Python, one of its immediate predecessors, there were plenty of valleys in-between the peaks), and those episodes are available in streaming form and DVD at Amazon and Netflix, yet another reason to cut the cord.

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At Big Hollywood, John Nolte writes, “Unlike De Niro, Tom Hanks Won’t Be Thrown Under the White House Bus,” and explains why the Tom Hanks at a fundraiser with a liberal investment banker in blackface will get zero traction in the MSM:

The Tom Hanks ‘Blackface, story, however, is a much bigger and better story. First off, there’s video from as recently as 2004. Secondly, it involves race. Finally, Hanks has close ties to the White House. These are three factors the media usually can’t turn away from — and yet they all but have.

The reason the corrupt media has apparently decided to ignore this story is because the corrupt media knows that this is the kind of story that could do real damage to Hanks, and the media simply can’t allow that to happen. Hanks is a huge, wealthy, left-wing movie star who finances and promotes the kind of left-wing causes the media loves (like Barack Obama). Plus, the media likes Tom Hanks, wants to bask in his approval, and are not going to do anything that might cost them his affection.

Click over to John’s post for his other two reasons. But what I found fascinating was his conclusion:

Up till now, and quite predictably, what coverage there has been of the Hanks’ “blackface” video has been obligatory. The only effort going into the story is the kind that ensures it will not turn into a narrative. In other words, a two-time Oscar-winner who in 2004 already had 25 years of showbiz experience is probably going to get away with the excuse that he was trapped in an “offensive” situation and had no way out … other than to play along and crack jokes for over over five minutes.

You know what that video reminded me of? A scene you might see in a movie where a bunch of rich, white people are shown behind closed doors revealing their true selves under the mistaken impression no one will ever discover what they’re doing. Imagine the movie as the grainy video unspools and the ominous music swells over the sound of Tom Hanks’ cracking jokes as a wealthy and mostly Caucasian audience eats the racism up.

Yep, this is a great story. Which is exactly why the corrupt media won’t run with it.

Similarly, what Hanks’ blackface by association episode reminded me of, was this moment in the third season episode of Mad Men, when Roger Sterling, one of the senior partners in the show’s fictitious ad agency dropped by his country club and sang “My Old Kentucky Home” (the title of the episode)…in blackface:

It was a reminder of how much progress America has made in the years since the 1963 depicted in this episode.

Well, except for Hollywood, which seems to be the only bastion of America keeping this tradition alive*:

But then, unlike the hellish business world of the 1960s depicted in Mad Men, Hollywood has progressed far beyond the smoking, drinking, whoring, sexism, violent emotional outbursts, hypocritical business dealings, racism and racialism of America’s past.

Umm, hasn’t it?

(more…)

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The Daily Caller has a video of Tom Hanks, along with Glenn Frey of the Eagles shot at “a 2004 fundraising auction, playfully interacting with a white man dressed as an African native, complete with blackface makeup and a giant Afro wig.”

As the DC notes, “Hanks most recently provided the narration for ‘The Road We’ve Traveled,’ a 17-minute-long campaign video meant to help President Barack Obama win re-election in November.”

For Hollywood and racial progress, that’s been a road backwards, as demonstrated by the above video. John Nolte of Big Hollywood responds:

Our friends at the Daily Caller have obtained video of what Congress of Racial Equality national spokesperson Niger Innis has rightly called “an orchestrated, heinous, and racist ‘Stepin Fetchit’ routine that Mr. Hanks was a part of.”

You can watch for yourself here. The full video is here. I don’t care what your politics are, it’s nauseatingly racist.

And what a disconnect. While Academy Award-winner and Obama supporter Tom Hanks and Eagles musician Glenn Frey parade around in the worst racial stereotypes imaginable, they mock Republicans. I guess they believe that inoculates them from bathing in open racism.

[Congress of Racial Equality national spokesperson Niger Innis] has also called on President Obama to remove Tom Hanks as narrator of the the recent propaganda film the White House just released.

This is a story with legs and it should be interesting to see how Hanks, the White House, Hollywood and especially the media react. You know, the same media that declares the use of the words “basketball” and “food stamps” as racist.

This week, Robert DeNiro flipped Barry Goldwater’s motto on its head — racialism in the defense of socialism is no vice:

At a fundraising event with the First Lady last night, actor Robert De Niro made what The Hill calls a “racially-themed” joke.

“Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white First Lady?” De Niro asked, to which the crowd cried, “No!” De Niro followed up with, “Too soon, right?”

That joke wasn’t just “racially-themed.” Generally, I don’t like to be among the people who cry, “Racist!” at every little thing, but there seems to be quite a bit of confusion in our country about what does and does not constitute racism. If sexism is reducing a person to gender, isn’t racism reducing a person to race? In these sentences, De Niro gives no reason whatsoever as to why Callista Gingrich, Karen Santorum or Ann Romney would make a poor First Lady other than that they’re white. He implied that Michelle Obama should remain the First Lady for no reason other than that she’s black. He surely has other reasons for his views, but, in this joke, he focused solely on the respective races of the women. That, my friends, is racist.

Not from the Hollywood left perspective, of course, which is summed up by this bumper sticker spotted during the 2008 campaign. Or to put it another way, “Progressivism is a religion that preaches salvation by faith, and utter damnation for the nonbelievers.”

Related: More racialism here, as actress Eva Longoria tells CNN’s Critical Race Theory expert/Rev. Wright shill Soledad O’Brien that Mitt Romney is “on the wrong side of every issue that is important to Latinos.” I had no idea that Latinos moved in such lockstep. Or that Eva had taken time out of her Desperate Housewives gig to poll them.

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This Daily Beast article on the Rosie O’Donnell’s epic fail at Oprah Winfrey’s low-rated OWN cable channel starts off OK, and gets progressively sillier, until, like a black hole — or Rosie’s career — it implodes upon itself:

As the final credits rolled, the Oprah Winfrey Network issued a press release announcing The Rosie Show had been canceled, following six months of humiliating ratings.

At the Harpo offices in Chicago, O’Donnell’s staff had been alerted of the decision only hours before, after weeks of rumors that the show was on the chopping block. Over a short TV life span, through countless reboots and hiatuses, the series had morphed from a delightful comedy hour that nonetheless premiered to weak ratings in the fall to a bleak, Larry King–style interview program with C-list guests like the cast of Dance Moms and Jaleel White. Through all the changes, some 30 employees from producers to writers had left because of budget cuts and possibly because of a boss who couldn’t decide what she wanted and frequently humiliated them in public. “It was such a fucking hellhole,” says one former staffer.

O’Donnell, despite her warm TV persona, has always had a reputation as a demanding perfectionist.

That last link goes to a hagiographic Newsweek profile of Rosie.

Written in 1996.

What’s happened since? In 1999, she famously demonized Tom Selleck, just at the moment Rosie’s fellow Democrats began losing the PR battle on the Second Amendment, a skirmish Rosie says she since regrets. I wonder if she also regrets this moment from 2007…

Was that last outburst merely just s*** Rosie says? It has to be, because, as Mark Steyn said back then:

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that’s one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

“I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?”

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

And presumably, if you believe the entire Federal and New York government are in on the destruction of the WTC and the attack on the Pentagon — which they would have to be — surely President Bush and Mayor Giuliani’s successors are, too. So why did Rosie feel safe enough to go back on the air?

Perhaps Rosie thought her staff would protect her, which is why she treated them with kid gloves:

Through all the changes, some 30 employees from producers to writers had left because of budget cuts and possibly because of a boss who couldn’t decide what she wanted and frequently humiliated them in public. “It was such a f***ing hellhole,” says one former staffer.

O’Donnell’s bullying behavior included belittling her colleagues.

Several staffers were very upset when O’Donnell clashed with Winfrey’s longtime director Joe Terry (who has since been hired by Katie, the forthcoming Katie Couric talk show). People thought she humiliated him when she scolded him in front of a live audience for using the wrong camera shots, suggesting he didn’t know what he was doing. She fired Winfrey’s stage manager because she felt like he was ignoring her and not doing his job properly. But some of her biggest fights were with “the games department.” She couldn’t decide what she wanted—The Price Is Right, physical games, or trivia—and was constantly belittling the people who worked on them.

And speaking of staffers at OWN, there will soon be less of them:

The struggling OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network has laid off 30 employees or 20% of its workforce today as the network is restructuring its operations in Los Angeles and New York. The responsibilities handled by the eliminated positions will be redistributed among remaining OWN executives as well as employees of OWN’s owners, Discovery Communications and Harpo Studios. “It is difficult to make tough business decisions that affect people’s lives,” said Oprah Winfrey, OWN’s CEO and chief creative officer, “but the economics of a start-up cable network just don’t work with the cost structure that was in place. As CEO, I have a responsibility to chart the course for long-term success for the network. To wholly achieve that long-term success, this was a necessary next step.” …

The headcount reduction also follows the latest high-profile OWN executive exits of EVP of production and development Lisa Erspamer, one of Winfrey’s closest and most trusted executives, and Saxe. OWN had been in cost-cutting mode in the past couple of months, with the efforts spearheaded by new Discovery CFO Andy Warren, who had been examining OWN’s books. In a first step, the network already eliminated temp positions.

As Glenn Reynolds recently quipped, “Oprah’s brand sure has declined since 2008. Did she do something to alienate her audience back then?”

Big Hollywood majordomo John Nolte tries to explain life out here in the real world to those inside the Daily Beast’s tightly-woven cocoon:

By any reasonable standard, Oprah Winfrey could not have found a worse person to prop up her fledgling network. To those of us who have spent a little time outside of Manhattan and Los Angeles, hiring O’Donnell looked the move of a suicidal executive determined to bring down her own network. Why would any sane person choose as their savior the most disliked and unlikable celebrity on a planet where the competition for that title is fierce?

So why does the entertainment media refuse to point out that which is so obvious to the rest of us?

Because the entertainment media is almost exclusively made up of leftists and leftists don’t want to believe that spreading left-wing propaganda into popular culture turns off the audience. Once that truth is spoken out loud, there will be less propaganda-driven entertainment and that is unthinkable to these folks.

Go to that last link and read the whole thing. Because you know that Oprah and Tina won’t.

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Tina Korbe writes at Hot Air writes, “Bristol Palin to Obama: When should I expect your call?”

In a post on her new blog and in clear, sincere language, Bristol appeals to the president’s highest, noblest instincts — most especially his instinct to protect his daughters, the instinct he cited as the reason he felt compelled to call Sandra Fluke to apologize for Rush’s insults. She writes:

If Maher talked about Malia and Sasha that way, you’d return his dirty money and the Secret Service would probably have to restrain you.  After all, I’ve always felt you understood my plight more than most because your mom was a teenager.  That’s why you stood up for me when you were campaigning against Sen. McCain and my mom — you said vicious attacks on me should be off limits.

Yet I wonder if the Presidency has changed you.  Now that you’re in office, it seems you’re only willing to defend certain women.  You’re only willing to take a moral stand when you know your liberal supporters will stand behind you.

But…

What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?

What if?

Ace adds that it’s a case of “Absolute Moral Authority: Bristol Palin Wants To Know When Barack Obama Will Be Standing Up For Her?”

I gotta tell you, I love this.

Well-played.

Make them live by their own rule-book.

I really do want to know– when will he be calling her?

It’s a very good question and the press should insist on an answer.

And recall Obama’s frequent ham-handed Godfather-style references to “civilians” during the 2008 campaign whenever things got too hot for him and one of his (to use another gangster-movie cliche) lieutenants:

[Allahpundit of Hot Air] notes a familiar phrase has returned to Obama’s lexicon: “essentially, spouses are civilians.”

Much like Reverend Wright was, back in April. But as I noted back then:

How is Wright a civilian? When your ideology makes “the personal the political”, and in an effort to create a holistic worldview, has politicized everything from religion to light bulbs to national defense, how can there be any “civilians” in politics?

And as Allah notes, Michelle’s “not a ‘civilian’ if she’s out on the trail promising that you’re going to immanentize the eschaton, champ.”

By the way, Obama’s use of the word “civilian” always strikes me as an odd Godfather homage, where the gangsters were careful not to take out anyone not actually in the mob. I.E., “Sollozzo knows he’s a civilian.” Ironically, and safe to say entirely unintentionally on Obama’s part, it becomes an even more interesting word choice considering the rapidly escalating level of real violence back in his hometown.

If Obama considers his hyper-politicized wife and former spiritual advisor to be “civilians,” then surely the daughter of a retired politician is a civilian as well and therefore, both out of bounds and deserving of a phone call as well. What say you, Mr. President?

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L to R: Breitbart, Glenn Reynolds, Driscoll at 2008 GOP convention.

Early on in Chris K. Daley’s new e-book, Becoming Breitbart: The Impact of a New Media Revolutionary, there’s a great quote from Mickey Kaus, on the power that Andrew Breitbart had quickly acquired, very early in his career:

In retrospect hitching his star to Drudge was a brilliant decision. This was hardly a given in 1995. Political blogger Mickey Kaus, someone who understood the power of the Internet, recalled, “I first met Breitbart when he showed up at a panel I was on at UCLA. He told me he was the guy who posted items for Matt Drudge, and I immediately realized he was the most powerful person in the room. Nobody could understand why I was sucking up to the crazed hippie kid in shorts.”

The power of Drudge Report comes from the large audience it has generated. By 2007 it was regularly attracting over three million unique visits. The average visitor spent an incredible one hour and six minutes on the site, an eternity in Internet terms. The average visitor went to the site 20 times a month. The Washington Post, a popular link for Drudge, noted in 2006 that its “largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge.”

And not coincidentally along the way, as a headline at Andrew’s Big Journalism site gloats, “Newspapers [have become] America’s Fastest Shrinking Industry.”

Flash-forward to the fall of 2004, and Andrew’s behind-the-scenes power was very much in evidence, this time changing the face of television news. As Scott Johnson of Power Line noted at the start of the month:

I learned in the course of [my week-long visit to Israel in 2007 with Breitbart] that it was Andrew who changed my life in 2004, linking to our “Sixty-First Minute” post early that afternoon with the screaming siren on Drudge. He confided that Matt Drudge did not like blogs, but that he (Andrew) was a fan. On September 9, 2004, he was following the action online. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for everything.

But along the way, Breitbart also took detours into other ventures, such as helping to build the architecture of the Huffington Post, and co-writing, with Mark Ebner, their 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted. As I mention in the podcast below, I met Andrew in person for the first time the week of November 14^th 2005, during the launch week of PJ Media in New York. After we both had returned to California, on November 28, 2005, I interviewed him by telephone for an article I was working on for Tech Central Station, now called Ideas In Action TV.com, about Hollywood’s box office woes, which was published a week later and titled, a la Woody Allen, “Hollywood Ending.”

I loved Hollywood, Interrupted, and I was certainly aware of Andrew’s backstage work at the Drudge Report and the celebrity-oriented Huffington Post. So I definitely wanted to get his take on how the movie industry, a medium that we both loved, had been utterly transformed, and not necessarily for the better, since its golden era of the 1930s through the mid-1960s.

This interview was originally recorded onto a cheap mono tape recorder, originally for the purpose of pulling quotes for my Tech Central Station article. And while I’ve done a considerable amount of restoration work (employing both extensive amounts of Izotope’s RX audio restoration software and the noise gate plug-in built into Cakewalk’s Sonar program), it’s still much cruder sounding than the podcasts and radio shows I’ve produced for PJ Media in the years since. But with Andrew’s passing, I thought it would be worth sharing.  So apologies for the sound quality, but I think hearing Andrew riffing on the topic of how the Hollywood of old became, as he would say, Interrupted, is well worth listening to.

There are several observations that Andrew makes here that have withstood the test of time. Early on, there’s a grimly hilarious remark by Andrew concerning his ailing grandmother, who emitted a piercing primal scream of terror, whenever anyone attempted to change the TV channel from her beloved CBS, the only channel she apparently ever watched, in sharp contrast to today’s world of hundreds of cable and satellite channels and millions of Websites and blogs. At about 17 minutes into the interview, he mentions the punitive liberalism and growing nihilism of Hollywood’s product, the latter of which being a topic I discussed extensively with Thomas Hibbs last month, the author of the definitive look at Hollywood nihilism, Shows About Nothing. And two minutes later, Andrew makes a great observation on the popularity of today’s show-biz-oriented reality TV shows as a sort of payback by the American people for today’s drug-addled screw-up stars abandoning the glamour they maintained during Hollywood’s earlier era. Near the end of the interview, you can sort of hear the Big Hollywood Website starting to coalesce in Andrew’s mind; a topic he and I would discuss a few years later on PJM’s Sirius-XM radio show in 2009.

A transcript of this interview, which I originally typed up in 2005 as raw material for my Tech Central Station article, and thus paraphrases some of Andrew’s more stream of consciousness remarks, follows on the next page.

Click below to listen to the podcast:

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(28 minutes long; 26 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 8 MB lo-fi edition.)

Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip.  Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

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“Fossil Fuel Production on Federal Lands at a Nine-Year Low,”  the Weekly Standard reports; naturally the MSM has their priorities in order, when questioning the president’s strange decision making processes which have played in a role in today’s stratospheric gas prices, as Daniel Halper notes elsewhere at the Standard: 

The Washington Post’s David Nakamura, today’s White House pool reporter, had these odd lines in his last dispatch, just as the president was returning from a speech in Maryland:

POTUS arrived back at WH at 12:45 pm after uneventful ride. POTUS was greeted in Rose Garden by Bo. POTUS didn’t reply when another pooler asked:
“Does Bo think you should release the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?”

So a gallon of regular is today costing Americans $3.82. And the question the press has for the president of the United States is whether his dog, Bo, thinks oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve should be released.

In 2010, Bo’s namesake liked to blurt out that Republicans talked about him “like a dog.” That mentality has evidently now spread to the MSM as well. And just last year, actress Kathy Bates shouted to CNN’s Piers Morgan that “I want him to stand up on his hind legs and fight these rat bastards.”

Given what the MSM and Hollywood now think of Obama these days, it could be a very long year for B.O., let alone his little dog, Bo.

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Back in 1999, long before Roger Ebert transformed himself from an insightful middlebrow movie critic to a wannabe pundit terrified that the Red (State) Scare would sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids, he made a great observation about Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson’s Sunset Boulevard character:

Norma of course is not a wrinkled crone. She is only 50 in the film, younger than stars such as Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. There is a scene during Norma’s beauty makeover when a magnifying glass is held in front of her eyes, and we are startled by how smooth Swanson’s skin is. Swanson in real life was a health nut who fled from the sun, which no doubt protected her skin (she was 53 when she made the film), but the point in “Sunset Boulevard” is that she has aged not in the flesh but in the mind; she has become fixed at the moment of her greatness, and lives in the past.

Trapped in your own Glory Days, as Bruce Springsteen would say. Which brings us to John Boot’s review of Wrecking Ball, Springsteen’s new album at the PJ Lifestyle blog, which thanks to Boot’s great writing and an Instalanche, is well over 130 comments and climbing.

Springsteen is a decade older than Swanson in Sunset Boulevard; he’s a physically youthful-looking age 62, but like Norma Desmond, he’s desperate to stay relevant in a young person’s game:

On the most incendiary song on Wrecking Ball, “Death to My Hometown,” whose title sounds like some sort of al-Qaeda parody of eighties-era Springsteen, the Boss ventures even further. The song sounds like a traditional Irish fighting anthem, and he apparently feels that the old-timey feel gives him cover to say exactly what he’s thinking about how bankers — “vultures,” “marauders,” “greedy thieves” and flesh-eaters — allegedly came to town and ruined everything:

No cannonball did fly
nor rifles cut us down
no bombs fell from the sky
no blood soaked the ground
…but just as sure as the hand o’ God
they brought death to my hometown
…they destroyed our families’ factories
and they took our homes
they left our bodies
on the plains
the vultures picked our bones…

At this point Springsteen urges his audience to shoot the evildoers.

So listen up my sonny boy
be ready when they come
for they’ll be returning
sure as the rising sun
…send the robber barons straight to hell

To make it clear how the robber barons should be sent to hell, the song climaxes with the sound of a rifle or shotgun being cocked and fired.

Springsteen’s meaning couldn’t be clearer, and though he will no doubt claim that his words aren’t meant to be taken literally, he has millions of devoted followers hanging on his every word. How would he feel if someone acted on his bloodthirsty directives? At the very least, Springsteen should apologize, recall the album, and edit out the sound of the gunfire, and maybe the line “If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight” as well.

No conservative or Republican entertainer could escape outrage and condemnation after issuing such a naked appeal to kill anyone by whom they feel victimized, and Springsteen should know that shooting bankers isn’t the solution to the failed promise of the Obama presidency.

The Anchoress responds that “Springsteen’s Phoniness [is] finally clear:”

I’ve never bought his “working man” schtick, and his mot recent “big” songs have been lazy three-note drone-fests (Philadelphia, Secret Garden). Now the botoxed, hair-weaved, fake “everyman” who summers in the Hamptons (where his children showcase their equestrianism) is writing some pretty irresponsible lyrics that appear to advocate violence against the fatcats and bankers with whom he rubs elbows while munching arugula at the Classic.

Maybe he’s looking to be the new Che shirt. He was ever a phony and is a phony still.

Actually, at the start of Springsteen’s career, he wasn’t a phony — and he was making some of his best music. But back in the mid-’70s, Jon Landau, a former Rolling Stone critic who quickly hitched his wagon to Springsteen’s hemi-powered drone, transformed it into an inert hybrid family sedan, stuck in the mud of a history that never existed. (No wonder Springsteen is yet another weirdly nostalgic “progressive.”) Back in 2005, in a rare insightful piece in Slate titled “Faux Americana,” (whose metatag reads “Bruce Springsteen, Bullsh**er”) Stephen Metcalf noted that Springsteen, who made brilliantly accessible music at the start of his career with albums like The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, was transformed into something unrecognizable by Landau:

By 1978, and the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the endearing Jersey wharf rat in Springsteen had been refined away. In its place was a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang, obsessed with cars, Mary, the Man, and the bitterness between fathers and sons. Springsteen has been augmenting and refining that persona for so long now that it’s hard to recall its status, not only as an invention, but an invention whose origin wasn’t even Bruce Springsteen. For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stonecritic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau’s future. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce’s artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen’s producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protégé’s head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Bruce’s musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. Springsteen’s image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.

Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He’s a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You’re either in or you’re out. This has solidified Bruce’s standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it’s killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers—they’re not saying Bruuuce, they’re booing—Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than “the new Dylan,” as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we’ve reached a strange juncture. About America’s last rock star, it’s either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.

But hey, when it’s an election year, the DNC knows who to call. Forget corporate rock — Springsteen is the ultimate Corporatist Rocker. Or as I wrote in 2008, to borrow from the vernacular of The Boss’s early ’70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

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Daily Show executive producer/writer Rory Albanese, perhaps tired of having to assuage his boss’s ego or simply wishing to inadvertently confirm recent poll studies on the intolerance of “liberals,” drops the mask and unloads a dense cloud of flatulent smugness:

Albanese said the 2011-2012 Republican primary campaign, with such colorful candidates as Rick Perry and Hermain Cain, has been comic gold for “The Daily Show” and other jokesters.

“With all due respect to the candidates, there is the view that all of them are insane. A guy like Santorum, who’s taking an anti-college stance? That’s funny. I mean, who the f— is against college?

Speaking of the bipolar clown nose on/off setting, I love that “With all due respect” throat clearing before Albanese’s reactionary trashing of the GOP. But to answer his question on “who’s the f*** is against college,” in a sense, the Daily Show’s core audience is. One of the chief obsessions of the Occupy crowd has been their own enormous student loans incurred in obtaining nonsense degrees on such topics as postmodern Nicaraguan hermaphrodite deconstructionist poetry — not to mention Derrick Bell-inspired “Critical Race Theory.”

At Big Hollywood, Christian Toto responds to the Daily Show’s producer:

Should political comedians want to find the funny from the left they can just tune in to Rush Limbaugh on any given afternoon. Or, listen to President Obama offer his latest silly defense for the wilting economy or how algae will help power the nation.

“The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart would have teed off on a GOP candidate who talked about algae in such a fashion. When it comes from Obama’s lips, you can hear the crickets.

The sooner comedy writers like Albanese admit that they have little interest in mocking the left, the sooner we’ll see comedy programs like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” tackle politics in an unbiased fashion.

I’m not sure I agree with conclusion that Christian reaches — while I’m also happy to see MSM producers such as Albanese admit their biases (and more and more have over the last decade), the end result likely won’t be a return to the comparatively brief period of “unbiased” media, but more and more hyper-partisan shows, narrow-casted to their target audiences. But as long as these shows disclose their biases and there’s something for everyone’s worldview, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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“If you’re less curious about who mentored Obama than you are about how Sarah Palin maintains a year-round tan in Alaska, you might be a liberal,” Jim Treacher writes at the Daily Caller. “Or a member of the media (PTR).”

Drip…drip..drip…

As with the ACORN videos, what’s on the videos sometimes isn’t as much fun as the media’s hysterical response to them. Regarding those earlier videos, as Jonah Goldberg wrote last week in his eulogy to Breitbart:

When liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.

He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.

The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.

60 Minutes won awards for hidden cameras, but when he used the same technique to embarrass liberals, such tactics were suddenly proclaimed ethically beyond the pale. The joke was on the scolds because they had to cover the stories anyway. And the stories got results. Congress defunded ACORN. Heads rolled at NPR. Andrew understood that news and arguments change politics if you can get the news and arguments to the people — and if you don’t let those who don’t like what you say define you.

Whatever his faults, that was my friend’s great and remarkable strength: He never let the bastards get him down. That took away his enemies’ greatest power, and they hated him all the more for it.

And this morning, as you can see in the painful to watch video above, “CNN beclowns itself painting Breitbart editor-in-chief as racist.” Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air:

Soledad O’Brien and her CNN panel manage to stumble into Contessa Brewer territory in this appearance by attempting to paint Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak as a racist for making a point about Barack Obama’s support for a proponent of “critical race theory” during his days at Harvard Law School. Joel ends up in an argument with a woefully unprepared O’Brien on the theory itself, but the actual facepalm moment goes to one of her panelists, who asks Joel why he’s so afraid of black people:

Only one problem, as Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler. “Joel Pollak’s wife is black. She’s from South Africa, actually, and her mother was a political appointee of none other than Nelson Mandela. Here she is, in video made when Pollak ran for Congress.”

I realize when you’re the farm team for Fox and MSNBC, you might be short-staffed, but whose idea was it to send Soledad O’Brien out to attack yesterday’s clip from Breitbart.com? As we saw last night when I pulled the Wright-Free Zone clip out of mothballs, O’Brien declared Wright’s speech to the NAACP “a home run” on CNN in 2008, and was given a personal shout-out in that speech by Wright himself.

But at least O’Brien has been an on-air newsreader for many years; as I’ve mentioned before, I used to enjoy her work during the early days of MSNBC, back when it was more Tech-TV, and less Air America with video. The bigger question is, whose idea was it to send Jay Thomas, last seen playing Eddie LeBec on Cheers, to pull the race card on Pollak? He may have just scored the only double-own goal in NHL history. Beyond his direct racialist assault on Pollak, as Jeff Goldstein writes at Protein Wisdom:

And as an aside, here’s a note to Jay Thomas: in your attempt to marginalize Whites who don’t engage in knee jerk paternalistic defenses of Black academics, you are in fact presuming to speak for those Black academics and take ownership of what it is they believed in order to try to protect them from the scrutiny they themselves invited by the very fact of their works and theoretics.

That is to say, by trying to diminish scrutiny of their scholarship, you are treating them as a plantation owner might the chattel he wishes to protect.

Which I’m sure has never even occurred to you, so convinced are you of your own rote liberal rectitude.

It goes beyond the soft bigotry of low expectations; it is the overt bigotry of the falsely pious. And the times, they are a-changin’…

Last word to Capt. Ed:

Frankly, it’s clear that no one at CNN does critical thinking, on race theory or anything else. The point of Andrew’s final project isn’t so much to make Obama’s early radical ties clear; it’s to point out how the media tried to keep them quiet. This uninformed attack from O’Brien and most of the CNN panel is a great demonstration of the very point that Andrew wanted to make with these videos. All they needed to say — and what Holmes tried to say at one point — is that plenty of people toy with radicalism in college, but drop those passions when they get into the real world, and that college activism isn’t terribly germane twenty years later with a term as President already in place. They fell into the trap set by Andrew and Joel, and somewhere Andrew is enjoying a mighty laugh over it.

I suspect he’ll be enjoying a few more before the year is done.

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From the January 12, 2009 edition of PJM Political, our radio show that aired from September 2007 through the end of 2010 on Sirius-XM’s POTUS channel, here’s my 15-minute interview with Andrew on the launch of Big Hollywood, which was then the latest edition to the Breitbart Big empire. Since I’m traveling today and may or may not be able to post much, hopefully this will hold you over in the interim, along with, I assume, frequent updates from the latest iteration of Breitbart.com, and of course, Instapundit.

(Want to download instead of streaming? Simply click here then.)

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As Dana Loesch writes, “Two days ago Jan Schakowsky released a statement condemning Rush Limbaugh for his remarks on Sandra Fluke.”

Bill Maher of Time-Warner-HBO, who called Sarah Palin a c**t, ehh, who cares?

Dana asks, “Does Congresswoman Schakowsky only find offense when she feels progressive women have been insulted? What of the war on conservative women?”

We already know the answer to that question.

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At his American Power blog, Donald Douglas links to yet another terrific observation by the late Andrew Breitbart.

And since I haven’t linked to it here, Breitbart was the topic of the first half my interview with another Andrew — Andrew Klavan — in a podcast we recorded on Sunday, and now online at the PJ Lifestyle blog.

(Via Theo Spark.)

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