Weekly Commentary and Thoughts from the Vault

Official Election Results from Yahoo News released today (which include overseas and military ballots just counted, I assume) show President George W. Bush getting 60,367,111 popular votes and 286 electoral votes. Excellent.

May I just state for the record that I continue to not care about the Scott Peterson trial? Now, if he were to maybe, juggle chimpanzees while riding on a unicycle, then, maybe, but you call an endless trial punctuated by an audio-only verdict "Hollywood"? Puh-lease.

So Yasir Arafat died yesterday in the comforts of a warm, clean hospital bed paid for with the millions of humanitarian aid dollars from the U.S. and the rest of the world. The only satisfaction I have in all this is that he is residing in a very cozy spot in the 9th circle of Hell right now, somewhere down the block from Hitler and right next door to the Ayatollah.

As for the future of the Palestinian people... I'm waiting for the newly re-titled Arafat Martyrs to side with Abu Mazen and HAMAS to side with Abu Alla so they can all blow each other up. It'll be interesting to see what side Syria takes in the matter... will they support one faction over the other? Will another Arab country then support the opposing faction, causing an all-out Arab civil war in the region, with Israel right in the middle?

If anything, this is the time for Israel to walk into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and reclaim the land. But they won't. You know, having to care about U.S. opinion, which means having to care about world opinion, being politically correct, doing it the UN-way and whatnot.

Will the Palestinians choose Democracy? The sad thing is, they don't even know that they have the option. Meanwhile, libs in America are arguing on their oppressed behalves, saying that some people just like living in the confines of 7th century Arabian law and culture. Where are the Alien and Sedition Acts when you need them?

And as for Former CIA Agent Michael Scheuer's statement, "I think our leaders over the last decade have done the American people a disservice...continuing to characterize Osama bin Laden as a thug, as a gangster... Until we respect him, sir, we are going to die in numbers that are probably unnecessary, yes. He's a very, very talented man and a very worthy opponent." I'd have to disagree. Bin Laden may have tactical knowledge, but ultimately, the man has chosen to die for a worthless and pointless venture. That is the definition of "idiocy," not "intelligence." Then again, what kind of mentality can one expect from the author of Imperial Humbug.

Well, time to peek into the archive. Every once in a while, I like to post a past opinion essay that has yet to see the light of day... this week's edition is a review of a review (originally printed in the LA Times this past summer) by that most Nitty of Nitwits, Richard Cohen. Like his fellow liberals, Richard manages to massacre world events both past and present, with that corteous lack of historical knowledge that we've all grown to know and hate. What's shocking is that for all their bowing down to the Ivory Tower of Babble, Richard feels that his total lack of a film degree grants him the right to write a film review.

But, that's okay. I feel that my total lack of a liberal ideology has granted me the right to write reviews on Liberals, so we're even.

History in 57 Varieties

Like the liberal philosophy he tries so hard to defend, Richard Cohen’s op/ed on the remake of The Manchurian Candidate is as convoluted as the new film itself.

The first clue to the conspiracy in this piece becomes apparent via Cohen’s vague attempt to mask his fervent faith in the promises of the liberals’ dead messiah, Karl Marx. This is so carefully done through his strategic positioning of the word “something.” “Those 22 men [US Army defectors to Korea] proved something,” Cohen writes. Later he comments that the new film’s bad guy is “big business, or something.” Carefully disguised as a null in a mind-numbing syntax, context clues prove otherwise. Phrases including “awfully rich and awfully evil” combined with a statement from the film’s director Jonathan Demme paralleling big profit with big death (one can only assume he had a sneak peek into the U.N.’s Oil for Food file) act as recognition phrases to the decoder. “Aha!” the liberal says, “we are into something after all!”

Fearful of being too obvious, Cohen quickly discounts Demme as one of the faithful for his services to The Man in charge of Hollywood, that Dream Factory out west who produces “acceptably preposterous” films. It is as if the writer is asking his audience, “how could we take something, anything they say seriously?”

Yet Cohen obviously does, because from here on out, the insinuations go from paranoid accusations to a listing of proven lies straight from the liberal conspiracy theory grab bag and far more dream-like than anything Hollywood could ever deign “acceptably preposterous”. Funnier, too, if they weren’t grounded so pathetically in proven lies.

After taking a moment to jump on the Bush-Bashing Bandwagon, Cohen returns to his film critique with what those in the scriptwriting business so aptly title a “plot device.” “It is a film about ‘them’ about ‘city hall’ (you can’t fight it),” he comments shrewdly. (I can hear the code breaker spewing out Ralphie Parkerisms now: “A crummy commercial? Sonofabitch!”) From here on out, Cohen’s commentary is nothing more than a prosaic version of The Communist Manifesto for Dummies. Big business, bad. Democracy, bad. Gulags, good. (Of course, he skipped over that part, in keeping with the liberal trend of “bobble-head now, truth be damned.”)
To grab the reader’s attention, Cohen then delves into an area scarier than Big Brother himself. The enemy, he points out, are depicted via a “deracinated type of anti-Semitism in which the mysterious evil ones are not Jews anymore and not really Gentiles, either, but merely the veiled powerful who control so much.” Mixing the idea of religion with that of race? Insinuating that a religious identity that is not quite Jewish, but more Jewish than not, has something to do with being all-powerful? Never has a description sounded so obscurely Hitleresque. I bet Dicky-boy and even Jonny would get a pat on the head and a lolly from Uncle Joe for that one.

“Halliburton instead of the Commies? Sure, why not?” The sad thing is, that isn’t a rhetorical question. The brilliant thing is, it is one of the “complex questions” with the “simple answer” Cohen is looking for: Liberty versus slavery, that is why not. Then again, maybe the answer he seeks was best worded by a Soviet friend-of-a-friend, who cried when she first entered an American supermarket. “Our government lied to us. They said your workers were impoverished, your leaders kept you oppressed.” Free market ideology lifted Uncle Joe’s veil from her eyes. Rhetorically asking, need I say more?

Cohen ends his article by remarking that the film “…is not as half as interesting as the audience that accepts its premise.” Apparently, Frank Sinatra believed the same of the audience who viewed his version of the film in 1962, although I don’t think “interesting” would have had the same denotation in his ol’ blue eyes. After the first Kennedy assassination, Sinatra pulled the original Manchurian Candidate from circulation for fear that it had influenced and would influence more executive assassinations. For all of Cohen’s downplaying of Hollywood’s narrative power, his conclusion agrees with Sinatra’s train of thought. Ideology is dangerous when it sows seeds in brainwashed minds. Just ask Raymond Shaw, or his present-day counterpart, columnist Richard Cohen.