HOLLYWOOD

Hollywood's betrayal of America: "How many Americans are aware that the most sophisticated tools of modern communication are being used on a daily basis in a vast program of disinformation about this country and its people that is beamed into almost every country on Earth? Every time I travel abroad I see this at work and witness its results. 'I am so grateful for this opportunity to get to know you and your family,' a Muslim Indian woman told me in 2000. 'We thought that Americans have no values, that they are materialistic, and care only about themselves. We thought there is no commitment to children and families, that everyone lives in immorality. It is so wonderful to see that these things are not true!' Where does this image of America come from? If someone had set out to create a powerful propaganda strategy to completely discredit America, they could not have come up with anything more effective than the Hollywood product shown daily to billions of people."

Hollywood ideology: "Once upon a time, there were people in Hollywood who loved America. And when America came under attack from enemies abroad, these actors, producers, screenwriters, and directors put aside their partisan differences and created movies that-unlike Michael Moore's new shlockumentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 -made all moviegoers proud to be Americans.... The movies depicted good and evil in stark terms. And there was no politically correct revisionism about who our enemies were. By contrast, even tough-guy Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to stand up to Hollywood mushes who were afraid to depict Arab terrorists in his post-Sept. 11 movie, Collateral Damage. Instead of encouraging Americans to confront the true face and nature of the Islamist threat, Schwarzenegger and his producers turned the Arab terrorists into Colombian terrorists so no one would complain about "racial profiling." Similarly, Steven Spielberg's new movie about an asylum seeker, The Terminal, indulges in weak-willed liberal escapism by demonizing Department of Homeland Security officials just trying to do their jobs.

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ELSEWHERE

The Happy Carpenter has just put up an impassioned response to the antiwar Left. It's a must-read. Worthy of Bill Whittle. Excerpt: "It was mentioned a few times at the beginning of the war and its 14 month rush-to-war that NAZI = BAATH. They are both acronyms for National Socialism.... It is no coincidence that they both involved mass murder, attempted genocide on Jews, multiple invasions of neighbors, and stubborn blind violence after nominal defeat. What seems absolutely unique to me, a very casual student of history, is the lazy acceptance of traitors in our midst. The new American Left wants us to fail. They want just enough American soldiers and Marines to die so they can whip the public into demanding another Vietnam style retreat. They make no bones about this among themselves, although they viciously insist that we patriots recognize their "protest" as the highest form of patriotism. It is not. We must not be afraid of their name-calling. Just as the insult of `bigot' and `racist' has worn thin and no longer stings like it once did, we must counter the left's lies. When they say "How dare you question my patriotism!" we must say "I question your patriotism because you are a traitor. You want America to fail. You want Americans to die. And you want this because you are a socialist who believes America is the greatest evil in the world. I denounce you. I spit on you. You are a traitor.""

Kerry betrays America ... again: "How is America supposed to win in Iraq, and how are the Iraqi people supposed to reclaim their country, when so many Washington leaders seem to be rooting for failure in Baghdad? ... Now top Democrats are talking down a war that has cost 800- plus Americans their lives -- with little regard to how their sniping might affect the war effort. You would think that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., never heard of the word "morale," by the way he is badmouthing a war that he himself had voted to authorize. Consider that while Iraqis have resented America's military presence, even in Iraq citizens were more upbeat than Kerry about the transfer of power. A Baghdad newspaper, New Morning, wrote a story headlined, "America Keeps Its Promise," for its next edition, according to NBC news. Yet in America, Kerry, who voted for the war, looked as if he had lost a bet. ..... The issue is this: If Kerry votes for a war, he owes it to the troops to root for victory. ...Instead, he has spent months undermining the coalition in order to bolster his own career."

How bad news from Iraq gets "created". "Iraq veterans often say they are confused by American news coverage, because their experience differs so greatly from what journalists report. Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in almost all areas of Iraqi life and wonder why they don't get much notice - or in many cases, any notice at all. Part of the explanation is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post.... While its national clout lags behind the New York Times, many reporters look to the Post for cues on how to approach a story. The Post interprets events, and the herd of independent minds bleat their approval and start tapping on their keyboards with their hooves. Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq - and if there are no events to report, they resort to man-on-the-street interviews and cobble together a story from that." (Via Mark Shea).

The latest threat from Iran: "Iranians are frantically increasing their efforts to drive Coalition forces out of Iraq, to wreck the Iraqi economy - and especially to inflate oil prices, which the mullahs hope will bring down the Bush presidency - and to destabilize the fragile Karzai government in Afghanistan. They, and their Syrian and Saudi allies, are doing this because the liberation of Iraq is indeed threatening the authority of the remaining terror masters in Tehran, Damascus, and Riadh. The entire region is bubbling from the heat of democratic revolution"

Further to my recent posts about homosexuality and Fascism, I have just posted here an extract from the 1938 edition of 'Inside Europe' by John Gunther which says that Hitler himself was completely asexual.

Oil can be a curse: "It is not coincidental that the only Moslem country with a working democracy is Turkey, which has no oil. Malaysia is also semi-democratic and "suffers" from not being mineral-rich. .."

The Australian Left are quiet about the Howard government's achievements in black education: "...the proportion of indigenous children staying on to year 12 has increased from 29 per cent to 39 per cent since 1996. The number of indigenous students undertaking bachelor or higher degree courses has risen by 36 per cent at the same time. This financial year, the Howard Government will spend 39 per cent more in real terms than the Keating government did in its last year. .."

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights.

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