Totally, you guys:

Left-wing radical Bill Ayers, a longtime friend of President Barack Obama, recently defended the series of bombings that he carried out as a member of the Weather Underground, saying that his bombings were not like the Boston Marathon attack and that America is the most violent country that has ever been created.

Ayers — who participated in a series of anti-Vietnam War bombings in the early 1970s including an attack on New York City police department headquarters and the Pentagon — answered an Akron Beacon Journal reporter’s questions after giving a keynote speech at an event commemorating the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State National Guard shootings.

Ayers said that there is no equivalence between his bombings and the deadly bombings that rocked the Boston Marathon.

“What I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said.

Ayers reportedly said that the United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, and said that Republican Senator and Vietnam War hero John McCain committed daily war crimes.

“Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence,” Ayers said.

Well, the Weathermen certainly had a funny way of expressing their pacifism back then.  These days, we tend to remember the Weathermen solely for the Pentagon incident (particularly after the New York Times’ fawning profile of Ayers that ran, with horrible synchronicity, on September 11th, 2001), and the botched Fort Dix bomb, but according to Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism, they were remarkably active in the late ’60s and early ’70s:

Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” [Mark Rudd is now is now "a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico," Jonah adds elsewhere -- Ed] “The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don’t,” explained a secret member of a “bombing collective,” but “between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks.”

Wikipedia has a page titled “List of Weatherman Actions.” It’s certainly extensive; it may even be accurate.

At Hot Air today, Allahpundit adds, “Good news from Bill Ayers: My terrorism was nothing like the terrorism in Boston:”

The Tsarnaevs wanted to kill people, whereas the Weather Underground mostly wanted to blow up property except for that time they built nail bombs to kill soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix but ended up blowing themselves up instead. Oh, and the time they probably killed a cop in San Francisco and wounded nine others. There’s the big distinction.

Two mild surprises here. One: Ayers doesn’t attempt to defend the Tsarnaevs’ motive, even though it was anti-war of a sort. This is a prime opportunity to lecture about “blowback” by the oppressed people of the Muslim world who object to U.S. imperialism, etc etc etc, even while condemning the tactics, but he doesn’t take it. Maybe the politics of defending the Tsarnaevs, however mildly, are too toxic even for him. Two: Almost 50 years later, he’s still looking for ways to defend the Weathermen’s tactics even though he loses more than he gains by it. You would think he’d regret setting bombs, even “just” to destroy property, if only because it made it easier for hawks at the time to discredit the wider left as radicals and terrorists. Nope.

Regarding those who would lionize such tactics, Jason Mattera asks the questions the MSM refused to when they gave Robert Redford’s new film an extensive tongue bath:

In his review of Redford’s pro-Weathermen movie (which he grades as a “B” — insert your own jokes here), Burlington (NJ) Country Times film critic Lou Gaul writes:

Redford, who earned an Oscar as best director for “Ordinary People” (1980), obviously wanted to tell this cautionary story, and his limited production budget of $2 million caused the film to look more like a cable movie than a major motion picture.

Thanks to his filmmaking status, Redford was able to attract top talents willing to work for much less than their usual salaries to be part of the ensemble. They include Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Anna Kendrick, Terrence Howard, Chris Cooper, Brit Marling, Richard Jenkins, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Christie and Nick Nolte.

A throwback film, “The Company You Keep” provides a welcome twist at the end and enough political ideas to generate post-screening discussions.

Funny though, as Ed Morrissey writes, linking to Mattera’s new video, “Hey, didn’t Redford make The Company You Keep to start a ‘conversation’? Looks like Redford isn’t interested in conversing these days.” Well, it depends on who he’s conversing with. Compare the inconvenient truths Mattera asks with this “interview:”

Though to be fair, fellow leftist George Stephanopoulos was at least able to get this moment on record:

Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.

If the budget of The Company You Keep was indeed two million dollars, as Gaul wrote in his review, then it’s turned a profit at the box office; though a very small one. I don’t think Redford’s going to keep up the payments on his environmentally correct estate on its royalties, however:

Oh, and speaking of “the company you keep,” at the end of a lengthy round-up of Ayers’ recent appearance in the news, Jim Geraghty adds the Obama connection:

Ayers recently elaborated on his relationship with Barack Obama and his political allies earlier in life:

David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true.

As Ben Smith summarized:

Ayers and Dohrn, who have been semi-officially rehabilitated in Chicago but still inspire a wide range of feelings, played a modest but real part in launching Obama’s political career.

Fancy that: Even Obama flack Ben Smith can airbrush Ayers’ Obama connection away through sufficient Bensmithing.

Finally, some food for thought as an exit quote:

“You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values.” – Bill Ayers

— Great Minds Quotes (@GreatestQuotes) August 19, 2012

Great minds, indeed.

1 Comment

On September 11th, 2001, I remember watching the horrors on TV with my wife and leaning over to say, “You know it’s only a matter of time before the conspiracy theories begin and somebody starts blaming this on the government.” When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon last Monday, the speed of social media meant that the conspiracies began near instantaneously. (“It’s a government false flag operation, maaaan!”)  Which naturally flows into this post from Neo-Neocon on “The Inevitable Rise of the Tsarnaev Truthers:”

It was a foregone conclusion that almost as soon as the bombing occurred and evidence began to churn out—and especially after the photos of the young and somewhat telegenic Dzhohkar were flashed around—a certain segment of people would begin (along with the Tsarnaev brothers’ parents, who at least have the excuse of being their parents) proclaiming the brothers’ innocence.

Sure! The Tsarnaevs were framed. Patsies! And all those people in the crowd with all those photos were part of the plot. As for the cop killing and the final shootout and all that—well, after all, wouldn’t anybody act that way?

Like the Soviet ambassador in Dr. Strangelove, their source was the New York Times. In more ways than one.

And note this:

I predict that there will soon be a market for T-shirts with Dzhohkar’s picture on them a la Che, if it’s not already happening.

Oh. I see that it’s already happening.

Will they buy the whole collection?

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Bad timing for a headline at the Internet Movie Database this past Saturday:

How he kept his radical edge

Robert Redford plays an ageing anti-war activist in his latest movie, The Company You Keep – just one more incarnation in an ever-changing image

Robert Redford’s new film sees the Hollywood liberal play a craggy radical, hiding away from a criminally subversive past under an assumed name. Once the FBI rumbles him, the agents on his trail spend some time comparing the image of his lined face to that of his much younger, 1970s, moustachioed self.

Cinema audiences across the world have travelled down that same long, ageing trail with Redford too, watching as his luminous youth in the role of Bubber in the 1966 film The Chase was gradually replaced, first by the poised cynicism of The Candidate and then by the stately leading man in Out of Africa or the worn-out sleaze of his Indecent Proposal to Demi Moore. Yet, as a man, Redford’s radical zeal remains undimmed.

See full article at The Guardian – Film News »

Shouldn’t Hollywood leftists be toning down the “radical zeal”? Especially in light of this item from Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism: “Scarborough Only Blames ‘Radicalism’ For Boston Terror, Not Radical Islamism”:

In an effort to cut against the excrutiatingly politically correct mindset on his home at MSNBC, Joe Scarborough mocked left-wing analysts who spent the weekend looking inward at America for possible motives behind the Boston marathon terror attacks.

Citing a column by Kevin Cullen, Scarborough said:

“Before you engage in the whole why do they hate us clap-trap, let’s just talk about the fact that these guys were evil. They were beasts. And guess what? It wasn’t our fault that they put a bomb at the feet of an eight-year-old boy.”

So far so good. But then, Scarborough can’t shed the PC shackles enough to take the extra, logical step of pointing to the leading cause of terror attacks in the world today. He uses the watered down “radicalism” as a catch-all to encompass all radical ideas under one umbrella, as if “radicalism” is the biggest threat in our society. He just can’t bring himself to point out the significant fact that the terrorists were hugely influenced by radical Islamism.  ”Don’t blame society for that. Blame radicalism, blame evil, blame them (the Tsaraev brothers.)”

But it’s not like Redford would support terrorist bombings, would he?

Scott Whitlock of Newsbusters summarized Redford’s appearance with fellow Democrat George Stephanopoulos on April 2nd:

George Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.

As I mentioned last week, it’s pretty rare for someone to drop the mask and admit that he’s cool with terrorist bombings; at Front Page, Bosch Fawstin explores “Robert Redford’s Terrorist Heroes”:

“ALL OF IT,” said Robert Redford, when asked if he supported the bombings by The Weather Underground.

Redford came out for terrorism on a mainstream morning television show in an interview with democrat-operative-leftist-hack George Stephanopoulos, who was slobbering over Redford’s pro-terrorist movie, The Company You Keep. I drew my illustration of Redford, below, days ago, and I wonder if he’s for the terrorist attack in Boston today. Or maybe he wants to wait and see if it’s leftist terrorists before he decides he’s all for it. Below is a list of what Robert Redford was for, via Sean Hannity on FOX News.

The Weather Underground’s history of terrorism consisted of:

1970: SFPD Bombing (1 Killed)

1970: NYPD Bombing (7 Hurt)

1970: NYC Explosion (3 Killed)

1971-72: Capital & Pentagon Attacked

1981: Armed Robbery (3 Killed)

(As John Boot at PJ Media notes: The Vietnam War, of course, had been over for years, [by 1981] which gives the lie to the film’s claim that the Southeast Asia conflict was anything but a pretext for the terrorist network.)

In their effort to give the aging Redford the full radical chic treatment, the Guardian profile the IMDB links can’t be bothered to notice the cognitive dissonance between lines such as this: “Redford is aligned with the anti-gun lobby in Hollywood, questioning the level of violence in entertainment,” and Redford’s pro-terrorism statements, such as this, only a couple of short paragraphs later in the same article:

The Company You Keep, based on the novel by Neil Gordon, has so far won two awards from the Venice Film Festival and is a hard look back at the radical era that made Redford. As a young actor in the late 1960s, he followed the leftwing organisation Weather Underground, founded on the University of Michigan campus with the express aim of overthrowing the American government.

“I supported their cause because I also thought the Vietnam war, just like the Iraq war, was built and sold on a faulty premise,” Redford has said. He saw the risks members took and watched the movement destroy itself. “I thought, ‘Gee, there’s quite a story in this. I don’t think it’s a story I want to tell right now’, he has recalled.

Journalists who interview Hollywood celebrities rarely ask tough questions, for fear of being tossed off the gravy train of easy access to stars. Will any reporters have the guts to ask Redford his take on the Boston bombers, and the rights of those people who were terrorized by them, both during their initial blasts and when the terrorists tried to escape the authorities later in the week?

(Incidentally, Redford’s embrace of radical chic in his dotage — and all of the hype the sympathetic MSM have given this film isn’t exactly giving him the edge at the box office.)

Related: “TMZ Targets Model for Donning Dress Decorated with Guns” – why are they giving model Karolina Kurkova grief, and not a superstar actor/director who is espousing pro-terrorist views? Or to reverse the equation, if Redford — and, as Christian Toto notes at Big Hollywood — anybody who wears a Che T-shirt gets a pass, why not Kurkova as well?

More: From Ace, “The Passive-Aggressive Voice: Newest Narrative From the Left and Media (But I Repeat Myself): It Was ‘Society’ to Blame, By Which is Meant Us”:

The left considers itself outside society, a critic apart from it, above it, superior to it, as a teacher is above and superior to his students. So any mention of “society” is an attempt to put blame on others. And the “we/us” language is the Accusatory version of the pronoun; they don’t mean they themselves.

Have you ever heard someone on the left specifically take responsibility for such a horror? The left could say, for example, “Perhaps by promoting terrorists as icons and to university professorships, we have transmitted the idea that terrorism is acceptable.” That would be a real expression of “We’re to blame,” we including the speaker. The true use of “we.”

But of course they never say such things. It’s always “We’re all to blame, because of various things you and specifically not I are guilty of.”

Also note that Melissa Harris-Perry pushes the idea that “we” (by which she means “You”) are “Otherizing” the terrorists — conceiving them as entirely unlike you — in order to reduce your own culpability for their actions.

Apparently it never occurs to this supposed intellectual that that’s precisely what she herself is doing.

Read the whole thing.

Update: “Report: Boston bomber confesses, cites US wars as motivation.” The more things change…

24 Comments

In 2001, when it was announced that Will Smith would be playing Muhammad Ali in a film directed by Michael Mann, this seemed like perfect casting. If anybody could portray Ali, it was the equally charismatic Smith, then at the peak of his career. Unfortunately, this was a case of the right actor in the wrong movie, at the wrong time. The film was released in late 2001, after 9/11, and after American troops first rolled into Afghanistan. As John Podhoretz wrote in January of 2002, Mann wasn’t interested in Ali the superstar boxer who was made for television, he was interested in Ali’s radical politics during the Vietnam War, and the timing and the lugubrious, inert feel of what should have an exercise in kinetic filmmaking sunk the movie at the box office:

It’s conceivable that the movie has failed because it’s a stiff. But moviegoers wouldn’t have known that in the first weekend of its release, and with Will Smith’s name above the title, it should have made at least $30 million. It made half that. Why?

Simple. Ali is a mostly worshipful movie about an American icon who converted to Islam — or rather, Elijah Muhammad’s bizarre riff on Islam — and then proceeded to dodge the draft while making speeches about how he had no argument with the people who were killing tens of thousands of young Americans in Southeast Asia.

You can perhaps see how uncomfortable this story would make American audiences these days. In 1975, Ali himself starred in a fictionalized version of his own life called The Greatest. Ali was charming and funny in The Greatest in a warts-and-all portrait that showed him being a selfish jerk with at least one of his wives. What The Greatest did not do was turn Ali into a political icon.

A wise move. As a political icon, Muhammad Ali is as much of a dud as the movie about him.

A movie that dwelled on the comic aspects of his life — that would have used Will Smith’s own natural energy and likability to its utmost — might have been a triumph. But such a movie wouldn’t have satisfied Michael Mann’s hunger to Be Important.

Memo to Hollywood: Draft-dodging Muslims are out. A movie with a Muslim war hero — now that might make a fortune.

Of course, Hollywood would spend the next seven years doing its damnedest to destroy America’s morale in the wake of 9/11. This was partly because they hated Dubya, and as Daniel Henninger has written, for many on the left, their most intense day during that period wasn’t 9/11, but a year earlier, when Al Gore lost the recall election to GWB, partly because of the nostalgic left wanting to relive the glory days of their protests against LBJ, Nixon, and fighting communism in Vietnam.

Which brings us to this infamous moment by Robert Redford, while promoting The Company You Keep, his new film embracing the Weather Underground:

As Scott Whitlock of Newsbusters summarizes:

George Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.

It’s pretty rare for someone to drop the mask and admit that he’s cool with terrorist bombings; at Front Page, Bosch Fawstin explores “Robert Redford’s Terrorist Heroes:”

“ALL OF IT,” said Robert Redford, when asked if he supported the bombings by The Weather Underground.

Redford came out for terrorism on a mainstream morning television show in an interview with democrat-operative-leftist-hack George Stephanopoulos, who was slobbering over Redford’s pro-terrorist movie, The Company You Keep. I drew my illustration of Redford, below, days ago, and I wonder if he’s for the terrorist attack in Boston today. Or maybe he wants to wait and see if it’s leftist terrorists before he decides he’s all for it. Below is a list of what Robert Redford was for, via Sean Hannity on FOX News.

The Weather Underground’s history of terrorism consisted of:

1970: SFPD Bombing (1 Killed)

1970: NYPD Bombing (7 Hurt)

1970: NYC Explosion (3 Killed)

1971-72: Capital & Pentagon Attacked

1981: Armed Robbery (3 Killed)

(As John Boot at PJ Media notes: The Vietnam War, of course, had been over for years, [by 1981] which gives the lie to the film’s claim that the Southeast Asia conflict was anything but a pretext for the terrorist network.)

Fortunately, Redford really did his homework, thoroughly immersing himself in the history of that intense and convoluted period before the cameras rolled:

[A]t a recent press junket, Redford emphasized that he didn’t do much research beside watching Siegel’s documentary.

“I didn’t feel I needed to, because I saw a documentary several years ago that came to the festival called the ‘Weather Underground,’” Redford said. “I felt that that documentary was very well made about the actual people … I felt I had a thorough description of them from the film.”

Redford’s film is now playing in an environment where real terrorism is front and center in the news. On Twitter, Bill Hobbs speculates:

Gonna be hard for liberal film critics to praise Redford’s pro-terrorist bombers movie “The Company You Keep” after Boston. But they will.

— Bill Hobbs (@billhobbs) April 19, 2013

Of course they will. As Kathy Shaidle likes to say, so much of “liberalism” boils down to “It’s different, when we do it.” This might be the ultimate case. Still, kudos to Redford for revealing his inner liberal fascist on national television.

Related: Speaking of the Company You Keep, “New York Times shows sympathy for Boston terrorist suspects,” as spotted by the Daily Caller, who finds the Times attempting to brand the suspects as just average Joes, slacker kids “Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying to Fit In”; “Brothers Seen as Good Students and Avid Athletes.”

Why, it’s almost as if, from the top down, the Gray Lady is pretty cool with this whole radical chic thing themselves.

Nahh. Can’t be.

More: “A Short History Lesson for the Media on American Domestic Terrorism.”

One More:

I guess Redford has his sequel, “The Company You Keep 2: Chechnyan Renegade Boogaloo.”

— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) April 20, 2013

Heh, indeed.™

4 Comments

“Would You Trust Your Financial Future to This Woman?” David Foster asks at the Chicago Boyz econo-blog:

Another example of Murray’s ignorance shows her also to be a nasty bigot. When lobbying against a contract award for an Air Force tanker plane to Northrop Grumman, she said:

“I have stood on the line in Everett, Wash., where we have thousands of workers who go to work every day to build these planes. I would challenge anybody to tell me that they’ve stood on a line in Alabama and seen anybody building anything.”

This blogger responds:

Perhaps Senator Murray has heard of “Hyundai.” They manufacture “automobiles.” She might be shocked to learn that Hyundai has a “manufacturing plant” in Montgomery, Alabama. She might also find it surprising to learn that Mercedes-Benz has a huge, state of the art manufacturing facility  just outside of Tuscaloosa. The last time I heard, manufacturing plants had “lines” where people “build things.” In fact, according to the Manufacture Alabama! website, Alabama has a strong manufacturing base.

Patty Murray is chairman of the  Senate Budget Committee. What do you think are the chances that this individual is able to understand the complexities of the Federal Government budget, or that she is willing to work seriously and objectively to analyze the issues involved?

Oh, and don’t forget Murray (D-WA) singing the praises of Osama bin Laden and his “day care facilities,” in 2002. Foster hasn’t — click over for the details. As the Professor is won’t to say, the country is truly in the very best of hands these days.

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Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals style:

It is one of the touchiest, most inflammatory subjects I know, and if you get into it, you will be accused of McCarthyism, for sure. No problem. I’m talking about American liberals and their relationship with the violent Left. The subject has come up again because of Kathy Boudin: Columbia has hired her as an adjunct professor; NYU has made her a scholar-in-residence.

She is, of course, a Weather Underground terrorist, and largely unrepentant, as far as I can tell. Susan Rosenberg was, and is, unrepentant too.

I wrote about Rosenberg early in 2001, because of what President Clinton did: In the waning hours of his presidency, he granted clemency to both her and Linda Sue Evans. He did not do the same for Kathy Boudin. Maybe he regarded that as a bridge too far? Anyway, my piece is called “Clinton’s Rosenberg Case,” here.

In this period, I thought long and hard about liberals and leftist terror. Bill Clinton, the editors of the New York Times, the English department at Amherst College: They would never kill policemen. They would never blow up young people as they danced at Fort Dix. But they would be tender toward those who do, wouldn’t they? Haven’t they?

Bob Tyrell had a name for certain people he observed in college: “coat-and-tie liberals.” They were not the scruffy radicals, who were naked in their aims. They were respectable, but they were not far off in their thinking from the radicals. Perhaps they considered the radicals purer, in a way?

—“The Weathergal’s a perfessor, &c.,” Jay Nordlinger at NRO today.

“Sigh: George Washington University students attempt to oust priest after discovering he’s Catholic.”

— Mary Katharine at Hot Air, also today, who adds, “Mind you, this is the same university where Anwar al-Awlaki was a chaplain, but sure, Fr. Greg is what causes them to reevaluate their vetting of religious figures.”

And while we’re on the topic of the Higher Education Bubble, don’t miss “The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World,” at the Wall Street Journal:

One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein for a round of golf about an hour north of campus. College presidents spend many of their waking hours talking to potential donors. In this case, the two men spoke about college life—especially “diversity”—and the conversation made such an impression on President Mills that he cited it weeks later in his convocation address to Bowdoin’s freshman class. That’s where the dispute begins.

In his address, President Mills described the golf outing and said he had been interrupted in the middle of a swing by a fellow golfer’s announcement: “I would never support Bowdoin—you are a ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons,” said the other golfer, in Mr. Mills’s telling. During Mr. Mills’s next swing, he recalled, the man blasted Bowdoin’s “misplaced and misguided diversity efforts.” At the end of the round, the college president told the students, “I walked off the course in despair.”

Word of the speech soon got to Mr. Klingenstein. Even though he hadn’t been named in the Mills account, Mr. Klingenstein took to the pages of the Claremont Review of Books to call it nonsense: “He didn’t like my views, so he turned me into a backswing interrupting, Bowdoin-hating boor who wants to return to the segregated days of Jim Crow.”

The real story, wrote Mr. Klingenstein, was that “I explained my disapproval of ‘diversity’ as it generally has been implemented on college campuses: too much celebration of racial and ethnic difference,” coupled with “not enough celebration of our common American identity.”

For this, wrote Mr. Klingenstein, Bowdoin’s president insinuated that he was a racist. And President Mills did so, moreover, in an address that purported to stress the need for respecting the opinions of others across the political spectrum. “We are, in the main, a place of liberal political persuasion,” he told the students, but “we must be willing to entertain diverse perspectives throughout our community. . . . Diversity of ideas at all levels of the college is crucial for our credibility and for our educational mission.” Wrote Mr. Klingenstein: “Would it be uncharitable to suggest that, in a speech calling for more sensitivity to conservative views, he might have shown some?”

After the essay appeared, President Mills stood by his version of events. A few months later, Mr. Klingenstein decided to do something surprising: He commissioned researchers to examine Bowdoin’s commitment to intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity. This week, some 18 months and hundreds of pages of documentation later, the project is complete. Its picture of Bowdoin isn’t pretty.

Read the whole thing.

Related: John Boot on “The 4 Most Outrageous Lies in Robert Redford’s New Pro-Terrorist Movie,” elsewhere at PJM.

Comments

My wife and I watched Casablanca at the movie theater in San Jose’s Santana Row Wednesday night; there was a pretty good-sized crowd in the theater joining us. (We saw the revival of West Side Story at the same theater a couple of weeks ago; Homer Simpson could have counted the audience on his fingers.)

In 1992, as part of the film’s 50^th anniversary, Roger Ebert, who passed away yesterday, penned a beautifully written take on Casablanca, in which he wrote, “There are greater movies. More profound movies. Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance. There are other titles we would put above it on our lists of the best films of all time.” Nonetheless, for Ebert,  “It is The Movie:”

Movies are, in a sense, immortal. It is likely that people will be watching “Casablanca” centuries from now (and how wonderful it would be if we could see movies from centuries ago). In another sense, however, movies are fragile. They live on long flexible strips of celluloid, which fade, and tear, and collect scratches everytime they travel through a movie projector. And sometimes films burn, or disintegrate into dust.

There’s another element about moviemaking that’s fragile as well: the culture that makes them. Casablanca was filmed in the summer of 1942, when World War II could have gone either way; the meat grinder battle of Stalingrad, which in retrospect sealed the Nazis’ fate, didn’t begin until after filming was complete.

The Hollywood culture that made Casablanca would age rather poorly and exhaust themselves in another kind of battle; in his 2009 interview with Peter Robinson, the late Andrew Breitbart chided the aging conservative executives who created the industry for handing it over to the cultural left without a fight in the late 1960s, as the book and accompanying documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls explores:

30 years prior though, in May of 1939 even before WWII had officially begun in Europe, a tough and confident Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring WB vet and Edward G. Robinson, and “considered the first anti-Nazi film produced by a major studio,” according to Turner Classic Movies. In 1942, the studio made Casablanca.

Warner Brothers is now but one cog in a conglomerate whose TV news network looks at dictators ranging from Saddam Hussein to Fidel Castro to Kim-Jong Il, repeatedly shrugs its shoulders and says, “meh.” (When it’s not openly embracing them.) Time, the pioneering news magazine that’s now just another component of that conglomerate was founded 90 years ago with the goal (in addition to turning a profit, of course) of allowing small town Americans to better themselves by having a concise update on the week’s events. (The magazine’s name was chosen by founder Henry Luce because it implied both the timeliness of its contents, and the ability to save its readers’ time.)  Since Luce’s retirement and death in the mid-1960s, his would-be successors at the magazine have consistently looked at its original core readers as The Other, this strange group of unknown readers out there somewhere in the hinterlands.

In the film Casablanca, the back story for Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine character implies that like many Americans, he was broke at the start of the Depression, took to a variety of unsavory socialist jobs afterwards, before hiding out in Casablanca and starting his saloon. With America on the eve of World War II — significantly, there’s a close-up insert shot of a credit voucher Rick signs early in the film, which is dated December 2, 1941, only a few days before Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — he emerges from his moral stupor to fight totalitarianism, beginning with this utterance to Sam, his faithful piano player:

Rick: If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?

Sam: What? My watch stopped.

Rick: I’d bet they’re asleep in New York. I’d bet they’re asleep all over America.

Hollywood went back to sleep long ago. Today, Robert Redford, who at the peak of his career, had the matinee idol box office clout of Humphrey Bogart, and is still capable of having his pet projects green-lit and funded, is making films in praise of a very different wartime American than Bogie’s Rick. The same theater in San Jose that showed Casablanca this week, will be showing Redford’s pro-Weathermen The Company You Keep beginning the end of this coming week. I’m glad there’s a week and a half space between the two films; too close would risk cultural whiplash.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Except when it is:

Reporting ABC News President David Westin’s plan to step down at the end of the year, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz noted “some early missteps” during his 13-year tenure, such as “a comment after the Sept. 11 attacks, for which Westin apologized, that journalists should offer no opinion about whether the Pentagon had been a legitimate military target.”

That apology was promoted by an MRC CyberAlert item in October of 2001 which put into play an answer Westin delivered during a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism seminar. Barely six weeks after the 9/11 attack, Westin was remarkably reticent about expressing an opinion, contending that’s improper for a journalist to do so – how quaint:

The Pentagon as a legitimate target? I actually don’t have an opinion on that and it’s important I not have an opinion on that as I sit here in my capacity right now….Our job is to determine what is, not what ought to be and when we get into the job of what ought to be I think we’re not doing a service to the American people….As a journalist I feel strongly that’s something that I should not be taking a position on. I’m supposed to figure out what is and what is not, not what ought to be.

— ”Flashback: Reacting to MRC, ABC News Chief Westin Apologized for ‘No Opinion’ on Whether Pentagon Was ‘Legitimate’ 9/11 Target,” the Media Research Center, 9/7/2010.

But what about the Weathermen, a late-’60s/early-’70s-era group of terrorists who had also targeted the Pentagon? Flash-forward to the present day:

George Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.” Remarkably, after this well known actor endorsed violence and terrorism as a political tool, Stephanopoulos did not question the remark. Instead, he tossed a softball: “Do you come out of the experience with the same kinds of empathy that you had going in?”

The ABC anchor offered just one tough question in the entire segment. He gently pressed, “I’ve noticed that already some critics have come out and said that you’re romanticizing radicalism. How do you respond to that?”

The Internet Movie Database summarized the plot of The Company You Keep this way: “A thriller centered on a former Weather Underground activist who goes on the run from a journalist who has discovered his identity.”

— ”Robert Redford Loves Stephanopoulos’s Fawning Over His ’60s Radicals Film: ‘You Ought to Be on the Marketing Team!’”, Newsbusters, today.

Ahh, the marketing team and Hollywood insiders who have twisted themselves up via pretzel logic to utter such quotes as these:

Tinseltown cheerleaders can’t stop gushing about Redford’s paean to gun-toting progressives, of course. Variety called the flick an “unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism.” The entertainment daily effused: “There is something undeniably compelling, perhaps even romantic, about America’s ’60s radicals and the compromises they did or didn’t make.” One of the film executives promoting the Weather Underground movie slavered: “This is an edge-of-your-seat thriller about real Americans who stood for their beliefs, thinking they were patriots and defending their country’s ideals against their government.”

You would think that Redford and and a Disney-ABC spokesman such as George Stephanopoulos would denounce such cinematic homages to terroristic violence. Isn’t it worth it, if it saves just one life?

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That’s the title of Michelle Malkin’s latest syndicated column, on Robert Redford’s public embrace of Bill Ayers and his sclerotic radical chic politics — and the pretzel logic of the Hollywood executives who must now talk up his new film:

Bleeding-heart liberal Robert Redford is already the subject of early Oscar buzz. His much-hyped new film glamorizing the lives of Weather Underground domestic terrorists, “The Company You Keep,” will be released in the U.S. next week. But peace-loving moviegoers should save their money and take a stand.

Hollywood’s romanticizing of murderous radicals is an affront to decency. Redford and Company’s rose-colored hagiography of bloodstained killers defiles the memory of all those victimized by leftwing militants on American soil.

Tinseltown cheerleaders can’t stop gushing about Redford’s paean to gun-toting progressives, of course. Variety called the flick an “unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism.” The entertainment daily effused: “There is something undeniably compelling, perhaps even romantic, about America’s ’60s radicals and the compromises they did or didn’t make.” One of the film executives promoting the Weather Underground movie slavered: “This is an edge-of-your-seat thriller about real Americans who stood for their beliefs, thinking they were patriots and defending their country’s ideals against their government.”

Shades of Oliver Stone defending another group that attacked the Pentagon, the 9/11 hijackers, in October of 2001. (Incidentally, September 11th, 2001 was the date the New York Times published their own infamous encomium to Bill Ayers, in a case of morbid synchronicity.)

Earlier: Two Redfords In One, from this past week, in which we spot Redford lionizing Ayers, and concurrently distancing himself from his legendary 1976 role as Bob Woodward.

(Originally posted this morning at Instapundit; a big thank you to both the Professor for allowing me to sit in, and to his stellar group of co-bloggers this past week.)

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Oh, that Liberal Fascism.

And the bloggers are frequent PJM contributor Kathy Shaidle and her husband Arnie, who blogs at Blazing Cat Fur. If the Toronto School Board wants to watch the Blogosphere spill gallons and gallons of pixels about them, they certainly picked the right two bloggers:

Joe Warmington has the story:

In what can be described as more TDSB theatre of the absurd, an obscure six-week-old blog comment resulted in police visiting his home like one might see back in the day of the Stasi in communist East Germany. (…)

***
Arnie has created a mega-post of every story he’s written exposing the Toronto District School Board’s insanity.

Read the whole thing, then follow the links.

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Regarding Rand Paul’s filibuster of proposed CIA head John Brennan, and how Mr. Obama or a surrogate such as Jay Carney will respond, John Sexton writes:

I agree that it’s unlikely the President or Carney will come out and announce a new position. That would be an admission of failure, a show of weakness. However there is another move that seems more likely.

Tomorrow when Carney is asked he can claim that this is much ado about nothing because of course the President would never use drones on Americans inside the US. Who would ever suggest such a thing? That way they give a response but the tone says move along, nothing to see here. They’ll claim the President is a champion of civil rights and that these questions are misguided and maybe even offensive.

The needed follow-up question is the one I posted on Twitter earlier: Would the criteria for targeting Awlawki have applied to Bill Ayers 40 yrs ago? Why not?

Heh, indeed.™

Update: At Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin writes, “Paul’s Real Beef Isn’t Domestic Drones:”

…anyone who heard all or most of his several hours of talk on the subject heard a great deal that shows he thinks the “perpetual war” against the Islamists is the real problem.

The unfortunate fact is that Americans will have to continue fighting al-Qaeda. This is not because our leaders lust for war or are enraptured with drone technology, but because our enemies believe they are engaged in war that will go on for generations until we succumb. Winning that struggle will require patience and endurance as well as the will to seek out these enemies wherever they may be plotting. Targeted killings of these terrorists are necessary and effective. But Paul’s core critique of the administration is not about a theoretical drone attack in the United States but about this very tactic.

Those who worry about Barack Obama’s fast and loose approach to the Constitution do well to keep close tabs on what the government is up to. But the president’s drone use against al-Qaeda is both constitutional and necessary. Conflating this policy with a plan to kill American dissidents or non-combatants sleeping in their beds here is merely a tactic aimed at transforming the debate about drones in a way that will make the curtailment of foreign strikes possible.

We can all take pride in the willingness of members of the U.S. Senate to stand up for the Bill of Rights and against the unchecked expansion of government power. But today’s filibuster is rooted in Paul’s unhappiness with American counter-terrorism tactics abroad, not those that have never been used at home.

Similarly, PJM alumnus Rich Miniter posits the following on his Facebook page:

RAND PAUL’S STAND against John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Brennan has a reputation inside the intelligence community for “failing upward” and would likely not be a stellar DCI. But Sen. Paul’s objection-that Obama might use drones to kill Americans on U.S. soil–is actually dangerous. In reality, you want the president to be able to kill Americans who are attacking civilians without a court order. Does any body really think that Lincoln have gotten a warrant every time the confederates took a shot at federal property. Should George Washington have had to get a judge’s approval to fire on the rebels in the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion? When people take up arms against our country, they are making war on us–not engaging in criminal activity. If Sen. Paul’s prevails, they will have all of the protections of criminal law–and the public will have none of the protections of military force. Hardly a good bargain.

As Peter Robinson asks at Ricochet, linking to Rich’s post, “Has Rand Paul Got it All Wrong?”

Update: “In the midnight hour: GOP Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell decides to #StandWithRand.”

Update (9:42 PM PST): Almost 13 hours later, it’s over. We’ll have more on the fallout tomorrow. In the meantime, as the Professor dubs it, the Tweet of the Day:

Perplexing that Rand Paul has to go through this to ask a Nobel Peace Prize winner whether or not he agrees with killing U.S. citizens.

— David Angell (@djangell) March 6, 2013

Update (10:09 PST): Bridget Johnson has a lengthy recap of Paul’s filibuster on the PJM homepage: “Paul Injects Life Into Party with Nearly 13-Hour Filibuster.”

Update (10:18 PST): Blogger SooperMexican presents helpful tips on surviving a domestic done strike:

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No, really. From the what on earth are they thinking?! department:

In her State of the City speech Wednesday night, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan mentioned that violent crime was not the city’s only problem — and she is correct. Burglaries of cars, homes and businesses skyrocketed from 8,797 in 2011 to 12,549 in 2012. That’s an average of 34 burglaries a day — or one every 42 minutes. So, Oakland resident Noah Garber was plumb flabbergasted when he saw what Quan’s weekly newsletter was advertising this weekend: a class on how to pick locks. ”For reasons that cannot be explained, and defy logic, there is a class this weekend on lock picking,” Garber wrote in an e-mail. “Given the uncontrollable crime in Oakland, we are beyond ourselves that Oakland can advertise an event on lock-picking. It’s akin to teaching a class on making IEDs in Iraq.”

The link from Quan’s newsletter takes readers to the details of the “Introduction to Lockpicking” class: “Have you always wanted to know how to pick a lock? In many cases, opening a lock without a key is easier than you think!” The class costs $40 and is open to ages 10 to 101.

“Don’t get me started about how she surrendered to the Occupy thugs,” Wesley J. Smith writes at the Corner. “Quan has to be the worst, most clueless mayor in the United States.”

As Yoda would say, no, there is another.

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Oh, that Liberal Fascism. Or as the New York Sun notes, its crosstown revival has now officially given up:

Talk about your constitutional moment. These columns have been predicting for three years now that America is entering what we have called a “constitutional moment,” in which our politics have become so divisive that ever more questions would expose the bedrock of the Constitution. Sure enough, America has gone to that very mat on everything from Obamacare, to same sex marriage, to gun control, to monetary policy, to whether civil rights law can be applied to the hiring of clergymen and women, to interstate commerce, to . . . well the docket gets more exciting every week.

Now, in the face of this great swelling of faith in our fundamental national contract, the New York Times has offered a new strategy — abandoning the Constitution altogether. It runs the brainstorm out under the headline “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution.” The piece carries the byline of a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, Louis Michael Seidman. He asserts that “observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken” but that “no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”

If this had been published on April Fool’s day, readers of the Times would have slapped their knees and guffawed. But what is one to make of the fact that the Times has issued this piece in apparent seriousness? It starts with Professor Seidman complaining over the way the Senate is being stymied in the fiscal fight by the constitutional requirement that revenue measures originate in the House. “Why should anyone care?” he asks. “Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?”

The internal logic, if that’s what it is, is just bizarre. Why does the fact that some of the House members were defeated for re-election make the House illegitimate? Wouldn’t that be the sign of the legitimacy of the process? If the House is illegitimate, why is he complaining about the grotesqueness of the Senate? If both are illegitimate, what does he want, George III? The Times’s writer confesses that “[a]s someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years,” he is “ashamed” that it took him “so long to see how bizarre all this is.”

Well yes. And in a sense, how new. After shredding the Constitution in WWI, and believing that the Soviet Union and Italian Fascism were totally cool and groovy projects to be emulated in the 1920s and 1930s, the liberals of the 1950s, as James Piereson wrote at the start of his  2007 book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, began to have second thoughts about totally abandoning at least paying lip service to the Constitution. Instead, they began to embrace their own form of Whig History, and believed that the ideals of the Founding Fathers flowed, albeit tenuously at times, into the concepts of the New Deal:

Postwar liberalism, because of the new political context in which it operated, took on a somewhat different tone and emphasis from the Progressive and New Deal movements that preceded it. During the decade of the 195os, thoughtful liberals came to understand that for the first time they represented the political establishment in the United States. Liberals had been in power for the two eventful decades from 1933 to 1953, and to them went the credit for the domestic experiments of the New Deal, the subsequent victory over fascism in World War II, and the creation of the postwar international order. Liberalism, as a consequence of these achievements, had earned the designation as the public philosophy of the nation. Even Republican leaders, like Dewey, Eisenhower, and Nixon, were obliged to accept the liberal framework of ideas, albeit with the hedge that they could carry it out with greater efficiency. The reformers and critics of the previous generation were now insiders placed in the position of defending their status and the achievements of their movement. Liberalism, a doctrine of reform, thus began to absorb some of the intellectual characteristics of conservatism-a due regard for tradition and continuity, a sense that progress must be built on the solid achievements of the past, an awareness of the threat of Soviet totalitarianism, and a conviction that its domestic opponents were radicals at war with modernity and bent on undoing the hard-won achievements of the previous decades. Richard Hofstadter, Columbia University’s prize-winning historian, expressed this mood very well in The Age of Reform (19 5 5), his influential account of the reform movement from the 18 9 o s through the New Deal. “For the first time since the 18 8 o s,” he wrote, “there are signs that liberals are beginning to find it both natural and expedient to explore the merits and employ the rhetoric of conservatism. They are far more conscious of those things they would like to preserve than they are of those things they would like to change.”‘

The mood that Hofstadter described called forth a distinctively new chapter in the history of liberal reform that contrasted sharply with the ethos of Progressivism and the New Deal. Both of these earlier movements were confident that they represented the views and interests of a majority of Americans; both sought to mobilize the public against the special interests intent on taking advantage of the common man. The leaders of these movements were all too happy to embrace the labels of liberalism and reform. Woodrow Wilson was proud to call himself a liberal and claimed that liberalism was the philosophy of all thinking men. Roosevelt and Truman said much the same thing. These leaders never found it expedient, in Hofstadter’s description of the liberalism of the postwar period, “to explore the merits and employ the rhetoric of conservatism.” They accepted, albeit in different degrees, the revised idea of liberalism that developed late in the nineteenth century, which held that, in the struggle for liberty, the conflict between the individual and the state had been replaced by one that pitted the individual against the large corporation and the entrenched political machine. In this new struggle, it was argued, the state was obliged to take the side of the individual and the common man against these new aggregations of power.

As late as the 1970s, liberals seemed to be able to co-exist, albeit tenuously, with the Constitution. Then came Political Correctness, and the left’s seething hatred for postwar conservatism. And thus, we’re reliving the start of 2011, with a shattering gun crime caused by a man with severe mental illness, and the Left reacting like Dracula seeing a cross when it comes to the Constitution. Or as John Hinderaker of Power Line wrote on January 5th, 2011:

Needless to say, the Times did not adopt a similarly surly attitude in January 2007, when Nancy Pelosi took over the helm in the House. The editorial continues:

The empty gestures are officially intended to set a new tone in Washington, to demonstrate — presumably to the Republicans’ Tea Party supporters — that things are about to be done very differently. But it is far from clear what message is being sent by, for instance, reading aloud the nation’s foundational document. Is this group of Republicans really trying to suggest that they care more deeply about the Constitution than anyone else and will follow it more closely?

Well, yeah. Actually paying attention to the Constitution would be a change. But now the Times shows its true colors:

In any case, it is a presumptuous and self-righteous act, suggesting that they alone understand the true meaning of a text that the founders wisely left open to generations of reinterpretation. Certainly the Republican leadership is not trying to suggest that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person.

Presumptuous to read the Constitution out loud? Seriously? And, in fact, the founders didn’t leave the Constitution “open to generations of reinterpretation;” they provided for the document to be changed by amendment. But most revealing is the Times’ hauling out the old three/fifths chestnut, much beloved by liberals who despise the Constitution. Never mind that the point of that provision, insisted upon by representatives of the free states, was to limit the influence of pro-slavery states in the House. This is, actually, a good illustration of how the Constitution has changed through amendment rather than “reinterpretation.” Once the slaves were freed during and after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment provided that the House would be “apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State….” So the paper’s snarky aside is entirely misplaced.

And thus we arrive at the start of 2013; and even some leftists are astonished at the Times’ embrace of fascism:

But really, why should they be? Times columnists feel free to declare their loathing of America and its traditions seemingly every day. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in September of 2009, when Thomas Friedman publicly embraced one party totalitarian China:

So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman’s intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are “drawbacks” to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these “drawbacks” pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.

I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it’s the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn’t picky in this regard). This is the argument for an “economic dictatorship” pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It’s the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives.

Of course, some “liberals” are in even more of a hurry than the typical New York Times columnist for action. Which is why, in addition to the days of Woodrow Wilson and other proto-”Progressives,” we’re “Reliving the Left-Wing Terrorism of the 1970s,” Hinderaker writes today at Power Line:

In many ways, it feels like we are reliving the 1970s, with the awful difference that Jimmy Carter has been re-elected. This story stimulates a sick sort of nostalgia; a hung over feeling, even though New Year’s Eve hasn’t even started yet:

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

If it were a Greenwich Village town house and the explosives went off before they could be confiscated by the cops, it would be a dead ringer for 1970.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.

People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.

Or as Allahpundit writes at Hot Air, “You’re already thinking about the double standard on how the media would cover this if they were tea partiers so I’ll simply note it and move on. Exit question: Which college or university will be the first to offer Greene a tenured professorship once he’s done his time?”

Teaching constitutional law, no doubt.

(And to cap off this thoroughly depressing post, see you next year, where further horrors no doubt await. Forward!)

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A journalist who cooked the books and avoided reporting on an international tragedy that was occurring in a far-off land and won a Pulitzer for his paper in the process — what possible relevance could that have to the twenty-first century? Well, let’s just say that he Walter Duranty really kept the news to himself, to coin a phrase.

Roger L. Simon, the co-founder and CEO of PJ Media and a veteran screenwriter and director, and his wife Sheryl Longin, a screenwriter herself, stop by to discuss their latest joint effort: The Party Line, the published script to their new play, with an introduction focusing on Walter Duranty by PJM’s own Ronald Radosh. Their play contrasts the lives of Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union was thought by many intellectuals to be “the future” of mankind, to Pim Fortuyn, who confronted a different kind of religious fervor in Holland — before being assassinated in 2002.

During their interview, Roger and Sheryl discuss:

● Why they chose the format of a play to tell this story.

● Who these two men were.

● Which came first? The Party Line or The Duranty Prize?

● The third historic figure in their play, the infamous Aleister Crowley, whom Duranty knew, astonishingly enough.

●  The “Penthouse Bolsheviks” of the 1920s and ’30s; the forerunners to today’s limousine liberals and Radical Chic.

● How they structured retelling the historic events they depict to create drama.

● What conservatives who feel impotent in the face of a hostile pop culture should be doing in 2012.

And much more. Click here to listen

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“Source: Obama has chosen John Kerry as Secretary of State.”

If true, as I wrote the other day, the sixties are now complete: A president supported by an ex-Weatherman and the New Black Panthers might as well have a Winter Soldier in his cabinet for the complete Radical Chic Meets Geritol experience. If only Leonard Bernstein was still around to savor the moment.

Update: “A while ago, The Daily Caller reported that, as a student at Columbia University, Eric Holder participated in an armed takeover of the University’s former ROTC office.”

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With Susan Rice falling on her Benghazi talking points, “Get Ready for Secretary of State John Kerry.”

And hey, why not? A president supported by an ex-Weatherman and the New Black Panthers might as well have a Winter Soldier in his cabinet for the complete Radical Chic Meets Geritol experience. If only Leonard Bernstein was still around to savor the moment.

Update: A video retrospective of her likely replacement — and likely to be approved, alas — causes Michael Walsh to have strange new respect for Rice: “Maybe Susan Rice should reconsider, for the sake of the nation.”

Or as Max Boot writes today at Commentary, “Obama can do worse in his choice of secretary of state — and probably will.”

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As Michael Anton writes in City Journal, while Tom Wolfe will forever be as associated with New York as Dickens is with London, he’s also spent a fair amount of time documenting the status seeking, lust to start from zero, and ambient weirdness of California as well. Not the least of which including…:

Wolfe’s next book after Acid Test was the great tour de force Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970). The titular radicals were the Black Panthers, founded in Oakland, California, four years earlier. That this anti-American group was welcomed into the bosom of the American establishment that it wanted to destroy was naturally treated by Wolfe as a farcical fad.

Wolfe’s friend Harvey Mansfield once remarked that you haven’t understood any paragraph in Machiavelli until you have found something funny in it. It’s unnecessary to look for the comedy in Wolfe; it will find you, quickly, and never let up. However, you haven’t understood any passage in Wolfe until you have found the seriousness beneath the surface. In the course of his research, Wolfe discovered that the Black Panther Party’s vaunted “ten-point program” had been drawn up in the North Oakland Poverty Center—that is, in an office established, operated, and funded by the government. These offices, he wrote later, constituted “official invitations from the government to people in the slums to improve their lot by rising up and rebelling against the establishment, including the government itself.” The comedic action of Mau-Mauing—tough-looking, angry-sounding ghetto warriors marching to downtown San Francisco to scare the bejesus out of a hapless white civil-service lifer so that he’d award their group a grant from the poverty program—would soon be institutionalized through the infamous Acorn and similar organizations. The rebels became a kind of parallel establishment and, eventually, the establishment itself.

I inform Wolfe that, as far as my research has discovered, Mau-Mauing contains the first publicly printed appearance of the now-ubiquitous term “community organizing.” (It occurs twice, in fact.) “Really?” he says. “I didn’t realize that.” Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the profession’s manifesto, was published one year later. It’s common, for someone charged with introducing Wolfe to a public gathering, to note how often he predicts coming headlines. Three months after the publication of The Bonfire of the Vanities, for example, the Tawana Brawley case exploded. Such feats of reportage are so routine for Wolfe that we have come to expect them. But it’s hard to see how he can ever top having explained the rise of Barack Obama when the future president was only nine years old.

Heh. Read the whole thing.

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Just in time for the potential chaos on Tuesday, I talk with Hans von Spakovsky, the co-author (along with NRO’s John Fund) of Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk. As you may know from his frequent contributions to PJM, Hans is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.

During our interview, we discussed:

● Did a 2008 article that appeared on a Website owned by the Washington Post really claim that “Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy’s health”?
● On the flip-side, is discouraging voter fraud actually an attempt to suppress minority voters?
● We need to produce ID when we drive a car, purchase liquor, get on an airplane, and go to the hospital. Why don’t we need it to vote?
● Whatever happened to that 2008 case of the New Black Panthers brandishing billy clubs in front of a Philadelphia polling place on election day?
● The late Andrew Breitbart instructed readers that thanks to flip-cams and the Internet, they were now the media. Does that same Army of Davids spirit also allow individuals to be better poll watchers, as well?
● How did voting fraud impact the Minnesota race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken in 2008, and how did the election of a former Saturday Night Live writer to the Senate have ramifications for the entire nation?
● How quickly — or how slowly — could we know the winner this Tuesday?

And more.

Click here to listen:

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Evan Sayet caused quite a splash in 2007 with his speech at the Heritage Foundation, in which he told his audience that prior to 9/11, he was a television comedy writer, until hearing his fellow liberals admit that they thought America had it coming. The cognitive dissonance in these arguments caused Sayet to reevaluate his politics, and he became a self-declared “9/13 Republican:”

Since then, he has been refining his positions, and has a book in the works, scheduled to be completed early next year. But if you’d like read over half of it, as a sort of detailed work in progress, it’s currently available on Evan’s Website in e-book and dead tree format. Titled The Kindergarden of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks, it fits comfortably in the niche mined by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism and The Tyranny of Cliches. Or as Dwight Schultz blurbs on the cover of Evan’s new book, “With this book, that spot between Allan Bloom and Thomas Sowell has now been filled.”

During our interview, Evan discusses:

• The laws of modern liberalism and their corollaries, how he arrived at them.
• Evan’s epiphany occurred after hearing liberals say that America had it coming to her on September 11^th. Does he think Barack Obama believes we had it coming on 9/11, as Rev. Wright said in no uncertain terms?
• Evan’s book features a quote from the late far left historian Howard Zinn: “Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable.” What did Zinn mean by this weapons-grade sophistry?
• Exploring the back story of “progressivism” from Rousseau to Nietzsche.
• Why does the Hollywood left — many of whom are actors and comedians who need words put into their mouths by writers like yourself — believe they know what’s best for the rest of America?
• What is the future of modern leftism, no matter what happens in November?

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Comments

As the Weekly Standard notes, it wasn’t online for long — but still, that seems an odd message for a White House staffed with Goldman-Sachs retreads, and for an administration that Wall Street wildly supported in 2008, whose reelection bid is financed with plenty of Wall Street money this go-around as well.

But then, no matter how many left-leaning millionaires and billionaires there are, for the average leftist, the world will forever be viewed through the prism of a 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon.

Kabuki? They’re soaking in it.

Comments