Yes THAT Jon Stewart!
Stuffy mainstream media have determined to give Fox’s ACORN revelations the cold shoulder. The other day establishmentarian Charlie Gibson of ABC was interviewed on “Don Wade & Roma” and was actually stumped…I mean STUMPED…when Wade asked him about ACORN. Imagine: it was five days into the revelations that members of the so-called community action group gave advice to a faux couple on setting up a brothel and getting away with it and this pompous ass anchor had to confess frankly that he never heard of the story.
Talk about insularity. The same aloofness goes for the Sun-Times and Mother Tribune: the story is beneath them and they imply beneath their contempt. In the old days reporters from both papers would be sent out to explore the status of Chicago ACORN to catch up with the national story. Not so with the fusty old Tribune whose fuddy-duddy approach is designed to keep its mushy moderate constituency with upper-plate wobble happy at the Hinsdale Country Club. The Sun-Times, of course, has a more honest albeit crass reason: it’s a skillfully packaged handout for the Obama administration…signed, sealed and delivered for today’s au currant liberal fascism which it displays via news blackouts of stories that don’t please.
Because ignorant Charlie Gibson showed himself incompetent and likely Exhibit A for journalistic nonfeasance, the news director of ABC has chimed in to help him. God help us, he sounded like the prattling headmaster of Philips Exeter I knew when I guest lectured there one week many years ago: “We don’t smoke and we don’t chew/ And we don’t go with girls who do.” But amazingly, liberaldom’s favorite comic, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central who strikes me as uproariously funny even when he ridicules my plaster saints, has chided the mainstream press by thundering that they were scooped and upstaged by two kids with a video camera who could barely qualify for the cast of a high school revival of “Best Foot Forward.” He wound up by telling the press “get with it, people!”
Evidently Yes THAT Jay Leno!
I have always regarded smug late-night TV comics with suspicion since it is clear they are driven to court social upscale wannabes who laugh at conservatives like me…but I am being educated to the fact that there is evidently something different about Jay Leno that distinguishes him from David Letterman. Leno came roaring back to TV the other night and knocked all his competitors out of the box on ratings. Yet he was severely panned by TV critics for having a show that was stilted, dull, a faint imitation of his old gig, etc. Very little mention was made of his spectacular ratings. Then a different critic wrote something that told me why.
Leno wore a familiar small American flag in his lapel which set the arch-liberal critics who disdain patriotism because it is so-so-so gauche. Letterman, he said, is the ultimate New York eastern lefty sophisticate. Gee, I didn’t know there was that much difference between them, did you? Evidently this octogenarian has been missing something. Leno is a patriot and Letterman is a scoffer with upraised eyebrow with attitudes that are pro-Third World and anti-American? Is this true? I still won’t watch either one but if among you there are people who are tuned in to the differences, would you please tell me at thomasfroeser@sbcglobal.net? And thanks.
Unsurprisingly, THAT Jimmy Carter.
This nation has been phenomenally lucky til now. It’s never had an ex-president who was dotty. The record still continues but for the last decade or so it’s had an ex-president who is malevolent which is far worse. Carter told an agog liberal press the other day that many critics of Barack Obama are such because they dislike the color of his skin. It got him a great deal of attention and as one of the nationally recognized certifiable failures in the office, he needs this to refortify his self-esteem.
Although he brilliantly maneuvered the Camp David Accords in 1978 culminating in a formal peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, ending a 31-year state of war between them and the return of occupied Sinai to Egypt, snags ruined its denouement over the issue of Palestinian autonomy, Carter was deprived of what he thought would be his lasting accomplishment, peace in the Middle East.
It was not to happen and because Israel would not surrender as much land as Carter wished, he changed and now qualifies as a subtle but nonetheless bitter anti-Semite. That came about as other turn-arounds did with him, through keen personal disappointment. He was once a decided pro-Semite and almost tearfully made his case before leaders of the Jewish community when he was being challenged for reelection by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) The Jews decided they liked Kennedy better which enraged the little fellow (5 feet nine inches tall and 155 lbs.). When he asked why after his presidency, none other than Henry Kissinger told him he was indeed memorable, having at one and the same time (a) the worst relations with our allies, (b) the worst relations with our adversaries and (c) the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the 2nd World War.
Kissinger was referring to the loss of Iran. Carter was of two minds on Iran. He didn’t want the Shah to leave since he was a friend of ours but Carter was concerned about his reputation as a supporter of human rights. The strange thing…which Carter never seemed to understand…was that the Shah was in great trouble with Islamic fundamentalists because of his liberalizing policies in Iran, particularly with his wish to empower women. So Carter kept pushing him to do more, do more, do more and the Shah kept responding “I am, I am! But understand by doing this I am losing the fundamentalists.” The big problem here at home was that Carter was divided between his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski a hard-liner and his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance a soft-nosed liberal who wanted the U.S. to identify with all so-called revolutions, even the emerging despotic one in Iran.
True to form, Carter was paralyzed with indecision. By following Vance’s recommendation, he withheld support from the Shah, convincing the Shah that he was secretly pushing for the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Shah was half-right: Vance and the soft-nosed liberals in the State Department bureaucracy were but Brzezinski most decidedly was not. The conclusion came when the revolution started and the Shah became gravely ill with cancer, necessitating the best medical treatment in the world. That was in the United States, the Mayo Clinic. But Carter vacillated between saying okay, the Shah could enter the country and denying him permission because he feared it would anger the Islamic militants. Brzezinski simply couldn’t do anything with Carter but finally…of all people…David Rockefeller did by calling Carter and saying that the Shah should be allowed to come in on humanitarian grounds.
The Shah did; the revolution occurred, Vance quit and the Islamic militants hated Carter anyhow as Brzezinski privately predicted. Carter’s weaknesses led to the militants invading the U. S. embassy and holding 60 Americans hostage. Carter tried to rescue them by helicopter but all three of them malfunctioned in the desert. By that time, the American people were totally fed up with the little man with the buck-toothed smile. The hostages were released on inauguration day as a gift to the new president, Ronald Reagan.
That experience, his loss of reelection and the heavy disapproval of the American people turned Carter whack-a-doodle: erratic. He turned against the Jews as the cause of all the unrest in the Middle East. By veering left, he ingratiated himself with the Nobel Prize committee which sees the American-hating Palestinians as a deserved retribution for the United States which it hates. So they gave him the Nobel Prize for Peace. Among the books he has written are two that Osama bin Laden has called for Americans to read “and believe.” Both are hotly anti-Israel, “The Blood of Abraham” written in 1985 but which Carter revised with anti-Israeli vitriol in 1993 and once again with more vitriol in 2007. And “Palestinian Peace, not Apartheid” in 2006.
The best advice anyone ever gave about Carter was from Ronald Reagan to Mike Deaver. Deaver told me (when he came to lecture at my DePaul class) he (Deaver) was upset about the criticisms ex-president Carter was making to our enemies including the USSR. “Don’t worry about it,” said Reagan. “They [the Russians] know he’s as crazy as hell, embittered about his past failures.”
That’s the way to look at Carter now.
…and maybe THAT Adam Andrzejewski!
Everywhere I go within the conservative movement, fans are telling me about Adam Andrzejewski (“an-GEE-EFF-ski”) the Wheaton entrepreneur Republican candidate for governor who has made a virtue of being untainted and unblemished by politics…vowing to bring non-participation in the process to the statehouse. Now as you know some weeks ago I gave him a few cuffs and have never heard the end of it. But it still remains true that where I hang out…principally at the Park Ridge Panera’s at 11 a.m or thereabouts most weekday mornings…I am slowly being persuaded that this guy has made one great indentation with Republican voters. I also get a lot of fans of Dan Proft but far more devotees of Adam. I once joshed here saying “would you want to employ a citizen surgeon to operate on you with no medical degree…or fly on a plane flown by a citizen with no pilot’s license or experience?” Well I really heard the other side on that one. Do you agree?
His views are clear and unqualified: pro-life, strictly fiscally conservative which I like. What do you think?
Write me at the above pro-and-con. Because I’ve heard so much about him from you, Adam’s going to be on my WLS show Sunday night.
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