The Hollywood Reporter wrote this week about Dr. Ted Baehr’s Movieguide Awards, handed out to the most family friendly films of the year.  According to the Reporter, “The report praises such 2011 releases as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Battle: Los Angeles, Moneyball, We Bought a Zoo and Hugo while heaping scorn on the likes of Super 8, Red State, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Bad Teacher and Happy Feet Two.”

Just as importantly, the report demonstrated that such family friendly films are significantly more lucrative than non-family friendly films: “Movieguide identified 91 movies in 2011 that scored high in ‘conservative/moral categories’; these earned an average of $59 million apiece. On the other hand, it identified 105 movies that scored high in ‘liberal/leftist categories’; each of those titles earned an average of just $11 million.  The average movie scoring four stars from Movieguide earned $53.5 million while the ones that scored just one star earned $10.6 million.”

“Most moviegoers want good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness,” said Baehr.

Baehr’s exactly right.  But there’s another element that’s just as important as morality in determining whether a movie makes money or not: who goes to see it.  And family friendly films are just that: family friendly.  You can bring your kids to them, your wife to them.  While I may love Team America: World Police, it’s not exactly the sort of thing I’m going to take my wife to see (in fact, I told my mom that it was too old for her).  On the other hand, there’s nothing in Moneyball that anyone from age 13 can’t see.  Family films, in other words, have an automatic demographic advantage over non-family friendly films – take a movie ticket and multiply it by three to start.

So why is Hollywood so addicted to making drivel like A Dangerous Method?  It really comes down to the Cocktail Party Mentality.  In Hollywood, all business is social.  That means you get jobs based on which parties you attend, which bigwigs you hobnob with, and which rears you kiss.  There are no families at these parties – no kids allowed.  You’re more likely to see a child being molested at a Hollywood party a la Roman Polanski than to see a child being shuttled around by her doting parents.

Let’s say you’re Israel.  An enemy dedicated to your destruction is developing the means to wipe you off the face of the earth, with the covert and overt help of world powers like Russia and China.  It’s only a matter of months before that enemy achieves its goals – and when it does you will not be able to stop the mushroom cloud rising over your cities.

So you come up with a sophisticated military plan to strike your foe in an extraordinarily targeted fashion.  And you ask for the help of your longtime ally – virtually your only ally – the United States.  All you want is covert logistical support … and secrecy.  Secrecy is of the utmost importance, since a full-scale aerial assault on your enemy is unfeasible.

Let’s say you’re Israel.  What would you say if the United States promptly proceeded to broadcast your military plans to the rest of the world?

Two little words come to mind.  And neither of them is “thanks.”

That’s precisely what happened this week, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced via the Washington Post that “there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June – before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb.”  What was the point of spilling the beans?  To scuttle the attack, of course.  According to the Post, “President Obama and Panetta are said to have cautioned the Israelis that the United States opposes an attack, believing that it would derail an increasingly successful international economic sanctions program and other non-military efforts to stop Iran from crossing the threshold.”

This has become pattern for the Obama Administration.  Back in June 2010, you’ll recall, the London Times reported that the Saudi Arabians had cut a deal with the Israelis to allow them to use Saudi airspace for a strike on Iran.  Where did the Times learn this?  According to the Jerusalem Post, “The report cited a US defense source as saying the Saudis have already done tests to ensure no jet is shot down in the event of an Israeli attack.  The source added that the U.S. State Department is aware of the agreement.”

Well, isn’t that odd – two blown secrets, two references to the U.S. Defense Department.

The real problem isn’t just the blown secret, of course.  It’s the signal it sends to the Iranian regime.  By letting the cat out of the bag, the United States has signaled to the Iranians that the Israelis are on their own – that the Israelis are in fact a rogue state operating outside the bounds of conventional international politics.  By signaling open opposition to the Israelis defending themselves, the Obama Administration has demonstrated to the Iranians in crystalline fashion that even if Iran develops weapons, and even if the Iranians hand those weapons off to a terrorist group for use against Israel, America may stand idly by.

On Thursday, Bloomberg News ran a piece by Carol Hymowitz lamenting Facebook’s supposed sexism.  “Most of Facebook Inc.’s more than 800 million users are women,” she wrote.  “You wouldn’t know it from looking at the board, whose seven directors are all men.”  Hymowitz pointed out that other companies, including LinkedIn and Google, have at least one female director, and only 11.3 percent of public companies have male-only boards.

So what?  Facebook is hardly female adverse.  Its COO is Sheryl Sandberg, and she’s paid almost $31 million per year.  She’ll likely own $1.7 billion worth of the company after it goes public.  Some sexism!

This is just the media’s favorite narrative about Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook – he’s a female-hating loner, as portrayed in the movie The Social Network.  And it happens to back up another of their favorite narratives: the notion that females have to face a glass ceiling at big companies.

I’m no defender of Zuckerberg – I’m happy to see that outspoken Obama backer facing the wrath of the liberal morals police.  But the glass ceiling is largely a myth.  Normally, feminists point to the supposed pay gap between women and men for doing the same work. But they always neglect to factor in time off women take for maternity leave and life decisions many women make to go into less demanding careers to leave time for family.  Correcting for those factors, there’s virtual pay equality.

Recently, the Government Accounting Office did find a pay differential between men and women … in the federal government.  Now, this is a bizarre situation because the government runs on pay schedules, meaning that everyone is put on a certain sliding scale.  There are no arbitrarily-defined salaries or bonuses.  The GAO discovered an unexplainable 7 percent pay gap between men and women.  “We cannot be sure why a persistent unexplained pay gap remains … but this may be due to the inability to account for certain factors that cannot effectively be measured or for which data are not available,” Andrew Sherrill, director of education, workforce and income security issues with the GAO, wrote. “Factors for which we lacked data or are difficult to measure, such as work experience outside the federal government and discrimination, may account for some or all of the remaining seven-cent gap.”

Over the weekend, I was reading Stephen Sondheim’s fantastic semi-autobiography – really, a commentary on his lyrics over the years – Finishing the Hat.  Sondheim’s brilliant, of course, and his use of language is exact – the rhymes and rhythmic schemes in Sweeney Todd are simply spectacular.  Sondheim asks the question, though, whether such linguistic playfulness is worthwhile.  He does so by quoting an anonymous pop composer, X – some have suggested it’s Pete Townshend of The Who – dismissing rhyme as unimportant in lyrics: “I hate all true rhymes [i.e. red and bed, as opposed to false rhymes, like home and alone].  I think they only allow you a certain limited range …. I’m not a great believer in perfect rhymes.  I’m just a believer in feelings that come across.  If the craft gets in the way of the feelings then I’ll take the feelings any day.”

Sondheim caustically observes, “Claiming that true rhyme is the enemy of substance is the sustaining excuse of lyricists who are unable to rhyme well with any consistency … The point which X overlooks is that the craft is supposed to serve the feeling.  A good lyric should not only have something to say but a way of saying it as clearly and forcefully as possible – and that involves rhyming cleanly.  A perfect rhyme can make a mediocre line bright and a good one brilliant.  A near rhyme only dampens the impact.”

And yet it is X’s view that has won out in today’s culture.  Turn on a pop station, and listen to the non-rhymes and false rhymes that predominate.  The supposed genius of Eminem is no more than false genius – his most celebrated lyric, “Lose It,” is a fragmentary agglomeration of false rhymes and forced rhymes, or the simplest of rhymes.  His chorus rhymes “go,” “blow,” and most strained, “yo.”  He also rhymes “heavy” with “spaghetti” and “ready” – none of which actually rhyme.  This is typical in rap, where the emotion of the beat and the syllabic rhythm are supposed to overcome the loose use of language.  Ideally, you’d expect rap to be the most exacting in its adherence to the rules of rhyme – after all, there’s generally no melody or harmony to the “music.”  But to expect rappers to abide by rules is to hamstring them, supposedly.

Unfortunately, art as a general matter seems to have followed X’s path.  Breaking rules has become more important than using them in service to better art.  Breaking the rules on occasion can be necessary and even scintillatingly fresh, but you have to know the rules in order to break them at the right time.  As a friend once pointed out, “There’s a difference between Miles Davis and the guy on the street corner.  Miles knew the rules, and he knew when to break them.”

[Editor's note: To see a video of Ben Shapiro's speech below, click here.]

I watched Mitch Daniels’ response to the pathetic state of the union address by Barack Obama – and then I fell asleep.  It was boring, uninspiring, and unwatchable.

Here’s what Mitch Daniels should have said.

“Good evening, my fellow Americans.  I’m not going to take an hour of your time, or half an hour of your time, or even fifteen minutes of your time.  I’m going to take less than ten minutes to explain the state of our union, how we got here, and how we get out.

“My fellow Americans, the state of our union is critical.  We are so deeply in debt that within the decade, we will be spending more in interest on the debt than we will on our military budget.  That’s just the interest, not the actual debt.  By 2015, we will be paying for the entire Chinese military budget, since we owe them so much money.  What have we gotten for all this cash?  We certainly haven’t gotten jobs – nearly half of all working-age Americans are either unemployed, underemployed, or have dropped out of the labor force entirely.  The real unemployment rate is somewhere near 11 percent, not 8.5.  The economy, to put it politely, stinks, and we all know it.

“Spending vast quantities of money hasn’t given our children a good education, either.  Thanks to the teachers unions, which effectively bribe politicians all over the country to keep bad teachers employed and tenured, American children rank 14^th in the industrialized world in reading, 17^th in science, and 25^th in math.  There are plenty of jobs available in America, in places like Silicon Valley – but we don’t have enough qualified people to fill them, because our education system has been bought and paid for by the greedy and perverse teachers unions.  And while President Obama talks about everybody needing to stay in school and go to college, if our schools are terrible, all we’re doing is prolonging their ignorance.

“And all that money we’re spending isn’t making the world safer, either.  China is building up its military.  Russia is actively undermining us.  Both those countries are extending their spheres of influence in South America.  Our allies like Britain and France are rightly angry at us – and our treatment of Israel has been utterly shameful.  In the Middle East, Iran is developing nuclear weapons and threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and we’re pretending that the international community is united behind us, even as Russia and China stonewall all action; Libya and Egypt and Tunis have fallen to Islamists; the Jew-haters in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been emboldened; Bashar Assad is murdering his own people en masse; Iraq is spiraling back into chaos; Pakistan is a disaster zone; and in Afghanistan, we’re now negotiating with the same folks we toppled after they provided Osama Bin Laden safe haven.  Yes, Bin Laden is dead.  But pretending that killing Bin Laden solved the Islamist threat is worse than wrong.  It’s reprehensible, because it gives us the same sense of false security that led to 9/11 in the first place.  Meanwhile, we slash the military budget.

“And things are slated to get worse.  In the next year, if re-elected, President Obama will allow the Bush tax rates to expire; he will vastly increase the burdensome regulations that kill business; Obamacare will kick in, destroying our healthcare system.

“Yes, this is President Obama’s fault.  It’s the fault of his radical leftist Democrat allies in the Congress and in the states; it’s the fault of spineless Republicans who cave every time they’re tested.

“But ultimately, this is a republic.  We elected these corrupt, incompetent, petty would-be tyrants and appeasers.  Want to know why our government is out of control?  It’s because for close to a century, we’ve lived out of control.  We’ve railed against big spending, unless that spending went to our home district.  We’ve bashed Congress, then sent the same corrupt and useless officials back to Washington, D.C.  We’ve talked about entrepreneurialism, then given the green light to labor unions that stifle innovation, regulators who protect us against a booming economy, and legislators who make their living by pandering to those who don’t work or pay taxes in the first place.  We’ve claimed that we care about a moral foreign policy, then shied away from victory.  Worst of all, we’ve pretended to care about the Constitution, then called for a government that ignores all Constitutional restraints in the name of “getting things done.”  And the “things” our government gets done have cut the heart out of American liberty.

The following article presents one interpretation of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. For a counter-view written by Ryan Mauro, in favor of Mitt Romney’s electability, click here. 

For well over a year now, we’ve been hearing that Mitt Romney was the inevitable nominee for the Republican Party.  I’ve personally heard it from Republican fundraisers, Republican Party staffers, and high-ranking conservative commentators.  Not only was Romney inevitable, they’d say, he deserved inevitability, because he was clearly the most electable candidate.

With Newt Gingrich blowing Romney’s inevitability meme out of the water in South Carolina and Florida, the question is no longer whether Mitt is inevitable – he’s not—but whether he deserves to be the nominee based on electability.

I believe Mitt is, in fact, virtually unelectable.  By contrast, I believe that Newt Gingrich has a serious shot at beating President Obama.  Here’s why.

(1) Narrative.  Presidential elections are decided on narrative and who gets to define it.  In 2004, conservatives succeeded in defining the race as a strong and stable wartime president against a flip-flopping Vietnam-era radical who lied about his war record.  In 2008, Obama and the media defined the narrative, which quickly became “The Chosen One.”

In 2012, the conventional Republican wisdom goes, Republicans must run as bland a candidate as humanly possible.  If they do, Obama’s record will be the issue rather than the Republican candidate.  Romney is clearly the least offensive candidate.

There’s only one problem: every narrative has to define both candidates.  The Republican establishment may wish to define Romney as a successful businessman and CEO with governing experience.  But he will be defined instead as a 1% elitist out of touch with mainstream Americans; his Bain Capital background will be trotted out to no end; his failure to create jobs in Massachusetts will become a key campaign issue (he was 46^th out of 50 during his tenure).  The Obama campaign is drooling to get their hooks into Romney – that’s what the entire Occupy Wall Street movement has been about.

Romney has been absolutely incapable of fending off such attacks in the primaries.  Gingrich trashed Romney over Bain Capital, and it clearly had an effect with South Carolina voters; Romney’s tax records have been more of an issue than Newt’s marriages in the last two weeks, despite the best efforts of Marianne Gingrich.

In fact, it gets even worse for Romney.  Historically, boring candidates don’t do the defining – they get defined.  Name the more boring candidate in each election since 1976, and you will be naming a loser: Ford, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, H.W. Bush, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain.  This is an unbreakable rule.  Boring candidates do not have the charisma or capacity to define themselves.

What’s worse, they don’t have the ability to define their opponents, either.  Romney is especially plagued by this.  The two issues of this campaign will clearly be Obamacare and job creation.  Romney loses on both – he created the model for Obamacare, and his job creation record is extraordinarily spotty.  The best argument he can make about Obama is the one he’s been making: that Obama is incompetent, that he has “amassed an actual record of debt, decline and disappointment.”  It’s a good argument.  It’s just  not a winning argument.  Kerry tried the same argument in 2004; Dole tried the same argument in 1996.  Defining Obama as incompetent won’t cut it, because in fact, he is extremely competent – at achieving far-left goals.

Want to know Obama’s counterargument?  It’ll look a good deal like Andrew Sullivan’s infamous Newsweek piece.  And if this campaign gets bogged down in the details of whether a recovery is actually taking place, even as Obama defines Romney as an out-of-touch richy-rich guy, Obama will win.

It will be significantly more difficult for Obama to craft a narrative about Newt.  Obama can’t attack Newt on lobbying – Obama’s stacked his administration with lobbyists, and he was the #2 recipient of Fannie/Freddie money in the Senate.  He can’t attack Newt on job creation – if Obama wants to argue Gingrich era job creation vs. Obama era job creation, good luck to him.  He could go after him on his personal life, but the only people who care about that are conservative, anyway.  He can’t attack Newt as an elitist – they’re both professors.  So what’s left?  The “crazy old coot” argument.  If Newt can avoid that pitfall, as he’s been doing so far with Romney, he can maintain his image as the “big idea guy” who worked with and against Clinton to create massive economic growth.

As for Newt defining Obama – well, Newt hasn’t been shy about that.  His goal is to paint Obama not just as incompetent but as unexpectedly radical – a man who posed as a moderate but governed like a hard-left ideologue.  Newt has been impressively articulate on this.  He may not cite Alinsky during the general election, but you can bet he’ll go after Obama on Obamacare, foreign policy spinelessness, and socialistic redistributionism.  McCain hit on that theme last time, but only in the last two weeks – and by then, it was too late.  Newt has already come up with the single catchiest title for Obama: The Food Stamp President.  It works because not only is Obama putting people on food stamps, he’s ideologically committed to increasing the number of people on food stamps.  This title sticks.  But it won’t stick coming from Romney, who looks like he’s never met anybody on food stamps.

(2) Numbers.  The Republican establishment constantly acts as though it must run the most moderate possible candidate in order to win.  Candidates without clear vision, in this view, run the best.  Once again, that’s wrong.  Gallup shows that 40 percent of Americans consider themselves conservative; 35 percent of Americans consider themselves moderate; just 21 percent of Americans consider themselves liberal.  That means that for a Republican to win convincingly, he need only win less than one out of three moderates and draw the entire conservative base.

The day after the Golden Globes, I got together with a friend for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles.  The Four Seasons has long been known as a celebrity hangout – it’s a super-posh hotel smack in the middle of the city – and so it wasn’t all that surprising to see Hollywood celebrities milling around.  One of those celebrities was Harvey Weinstein, the man whose company stands behind such art-house hits and commercial mediocrities as The Iron Lady, My Week With Marilyn, The Artist, and W.E.  This is the man Madonna called “The Punisher” and Meryl Streep called “God,” large pockmarked bullies with enormous pocketbooks passing for deities in Tinseltown.

Weinstein is also widely known as one of the biggest jerks in Hollywood.  The word “jerk” is a dramatic understatement here, but the more accurate terms don’t belong on a family website.  He once put New York Observer editor Andrew Goldman in a headlock and dragged him out into the street after Goldman had the temerity to defend another reporter who asked Weinstein tough questions.  He has reportedly threatened and assaulted other writers and directors.  Hollywoodites have accused Weinstein of cooking the books.

So it was no surprise that when my friend at breakfast had the temerity to say “Congratulations!” to Weinstein on his Golden Globes victories, he glared at my friend as though he’d thrown up on his $1,000 shoes before muttering “Thanks” without enthusiasm.

Which leads to a bigger question: who the hell do these people think they are?

Hollywood doesn’t seem able to understand why the bulk of Americans both adore them and think they’re the scum of the earth.  Both answers were in evidence at the Golden Globes this week.

First, why we adore them.  We adore Hollywood because it entertains us.  It’s that simple.  The people there may act like royalty but they’re glorified court jesters, dancing to our amusement at $10 a pop.  They make us laugh, make us cry, and tell us stories.  What’s not to like?

Well, what’s not to like is who they actually are (here we speak mostly of actors, who have the most unearned self-esteem).  They make lots of money and dress beautifully, which is all fine and dandy (although it must be pointed out that making millions to cry on film is not exactly the same as making millions to perform heart surgery).  The real problem, though, is that so many Hollywoodites treat others badly; they act as though we’re interested in them not because of what they do on screen, but because of their sheer intellectual brilliance; and, more perversely, they act as though they’re men and women of the people—the 99%– when they scorn the people with the unbridled contemptuousness of the true elitists who define what the 1%  is.

This week, Matt Drudge turned The Obamas, by New York Times columnist Jodi Kantor, into an instant bestseller by linking to a story that cited an anecdote from the book.  It claimed that the Obamas held a spare-no-expense Halloween party at the White House.  “For the Obamas’ first celebration in the White House, Desiree Rogers and her team turned the building into a spooky wonderland, with orange spotlights, thousand-pound pumpkins, and musicians dressed like skeletons,” Kantor reports.  Inside the White House, at the VIP party, kids could play with George Lucas’ actual Wookies.  More prominently, the State Dining Room was “decorated by the movie director Tim Burton in his signature creepy-comic style,” based on his new movie Alice in Wonderland.  Johnny Depp showed up dressed as the Mad Hatter.

The White House hid the party from public view.  They didn’t want the rest of the nation to know how they were spending our hard-earned tax dollars on an episode of MTV’s My Sweet Sixteen.  Thus, neither Burton nor Depp showed up on White House visitor logs.

While this revelation in Kantor’s book is dismaying, it’s her portrayal of our Commander-In-Chief that is truly shocking.  Barack Obama comes off as a man with deep personal issues, manifested in a supreme self-centeredness and tremendous insecurity.  He is emotionally fragile, unable to stand criticism, and bewildered by dissent.

Take, for example, Obama’s tendency to cry.  In Kantor’s book, Obama is repeatedly on the verge of tears.  “During the campaign,” writes Kantor, “Obama told friends he couldn’t look at [Valerie] Jarrett during speeches lest he become too emotional and start to cry.”  (That was because  Jarrett played both sister and mother to Obama, as Kantor relates.)  At the launch party for his poorly-written second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Kantor says, “he stood alone at the front of the tent, overcome with tears.”  Just a few pages later, Obama is at it again, “tears in his eyes” while watching his daughter “practice dance moves,” since he sees her so seldom.  Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the Obamas “felt better understood than they did in Washington” – and once again, Obama was “fighting back tears” during his speech.

Sensitivity is fine and dandy, but all too often, it comes along with serious insecurities of narcissism.  That’s clearly the case with Obama, who apparently surrounds himself with women who overpower him (Michelle, Valerie Jarrett), then bullies everyone else.  That self-centeredness translates into an obsession with power, even when it is exercised in absolute trivialities.  A particularly illuminating example comes from early in Obama’s tenure in office.  “Even amid the confounding crises of his first months in office,” Kantor writes,

“Barack Obama took satisfaction in a simple, glorious new truth: he was the president of the United States.  One day he walked out of a meeting in his chief of staff’s office and began to flip through a stack of magazines on the desk of a young assistant to [Rahm] Emanuel.  ‘Whose are these?’ he asked the assistant.  Well, they just got sent here, addressed to the chief of staff, she replied.  Then she paused and rethought her answer.  ‘But everything in the White House is yours … so technically they’re yours,’ she said.  The president shot her a satisfied look.  The following day, he passed her desk and he magazines again.  ‘Whose magazines are these?’ he asked.  She had the answer ready this time.  ‘They’re your magazines, Mr. President,” she said.  Obama grinned and continued on his way.”

The day before the New Hampshire caucuses, Mitt Romney’s opponents finally decided on a strategy to attack him – from the left.  Now, lest you think this is nuts in a Republican primary, remember that John McCain was our presidential nominee in 2008.  Which means that unless someone cuts into Romney’s “moderate” base, we will likely see him as the nominee.

Thus Newt Gingrich released the hounds on the frontrunner, telling audiences that Romney has “some very big questions to answer” about his time at Bain Capital, the investment firm at which he was CEO.  “I don’t have much respect if you rig the game so you end up walking off with all the money,” Gingrich told Bloomberg TV.  Gingrich cited one particular case in which Bain invested $30 million in a company, only to withdraw $180 million later, sending the company into bankruptcy.  The question, said Gingrich, was whether “these particular companies were being manipulated by the guys who invested in order to drain them of their money, leaving behind people who are unemployed.”

Is this attack fair?  In some ways, it is.  Romney has run on his record at Bain Capital, suggesting that he created some 100,000 jobs in his time there.  When asked by George Stephanopoulos whether this number was “net” – meaning that it took into account the jobs created minus the jobs cut – Romney answered that it was.  There’s only one problem: it clearly wasn’t.  In his 1994 campaign, Romney claimed that he had created 10,000 jobs; by today, that number has multiplied by ten.  What changed?  The companies he founded or invested in grew.  But that’s not solely due to Romney’s involvement of course – it’s like arguing, as my grandmother jokingly does, that all of our accomplishments are due to her getting pregnant with my father some 55 years ago.  Sure, it’s true technically.  But there have been a few intervening events in that time frame.

So Romney made his record on jobs at Bain an issue.  Thus, his actual job creation record becomes fair game.

That’s doubly true when you take into account Romney’s Super-PAC ads against Gingrich in Iowa, which were both brutal and slightly misleading.  Presidential races do have karma, and Romney brought the bad juju on himself.

The broader question is whether Romney’s success at Bain Capital should be judged on job creation in the first place.  It shouldn’t.  When Romney’s opponents suggest that his record at Bain Capital was all about cutting jobs, they miss the point: Romney’s job at Bain Capital was to turn companies profitable, or to dismantle them on behalf of his investors.  His job wasn’t to create jobs – it was to create profit.

This is one of the key pitfalls that conservatives keep running into on economics.  They know that for public relations reasons, they must talk jobs – but employment is an almost irrelevant byproduct of true economic health.  A company is not better run or more useful because it “creates jobs.”  A solid company is a solid company because it offers useful services and goods for prices people are willing to pay, and is able to continue offering those services and goods because it does not spend more than it takes in.

That’s why GM, which employed 92,000 people at the time of its collapse, was a rotten company; that’s why Microsoft, which employs approximately the same number but ran a profit of $14.6 billion in 2010, is a great company.  GM needed government bailouts; Microsoft didn’t.  With GM, we ended up paying to preserve the jobs of people at companies whose goods and services we don’t want to buy.  With Microsoft we didn’t.  Why?  Because jobs numbers are a terrible gauge of economic health.  Just ask the Soviet Union, where everyone had a job but nobody had a potato.

In 2011, Hollywood’s revenue dropped 3.36 percent.  That doesn’t sound like a lot of money until you realize that Hollywood has jacked up its prices for movie tickets to Weimar Republic-rates.  And its movies are not nearly Fritz Lang quality.  Fewer and fewer Americans are rolling their wheelbarrows of cash to the nearest multiplex.  In fact, take away the conclusion of the Harry Potter film series, the latest Transformers sequel, and the most recent installation of Pirates of the Caribbean, and Hollywood had a downright awful year.

Maybe it has to do with the movies.  They’re terrible.

It’s not that Hollywood doesn’t have the potential to make great film anymore.  In 2010, Hollywood did itself proud with The King’s Speech, Inception, Toy Story 3, Tangled, How To Train Your Dragon, The Fighter, and Rabbit Hole.  In 2011, Hollywood humiliated itself with The Tree of Life, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, A Dangerous Method, The Descendants, Drive, J. Edgar, Melancholia, and other depressing dreck.

So what happened?  Hollywood went political once again.  Three of Hollywood’s big releases – upcoming or recent – highlight the problem that Tinseltown has in stifling its political liberalism.  There’s a reason that none of these films made lots of money, or will make lots of money.

First, J. Edgar.  Clint Eastwood’s love affair with drab colors comes to its culmination in this perverse biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, a complex character to be certain, but one turned into a cliché-ridden closeted homosexual by militant gay Milk-writer Dustin Lance Black.  There is a lot to unpack about Hoover, including the fact that he did uncover massive amounts of Soviet espionage.  But there is precisely zero evidence to suggest that he liked trying on dresses.  As far as Hollywood is concerned, though, if Hoover had just visited Fire Island as a teen, America would have been spared the Red Menace.

Then there’s The Iron Lady, the Meryl Streep-starring Margaret Thatcher biopic.  Instead of focusing on Thatcher’s accomplishments, the film places the entire story of her career in the context of a made-up miasmatic present in which Thatcher wanders around suffering from dementia.  The movie has no grand sucker punches, but the fact that the creators of the film felt it necessary to turn Thatcher into a victim of senility in order to make her sympathetic is bad enough.

Finally, there’s Steven Spielberg’s new Lincoln biopic, due out next year.  In case you thought that Spielberg had moved beyond the historical and moral atrocity that was Munich – well, not so much.  This biopic will be written by Dustin Lance Black’s elder counterpart, Tony Kushner – a radical leftist gay man and wildly overrated hack who thinks that Lincoln was a bisexual.  “I’m struggling with that question while I’m writing it,” says Kushner.  “The historical record is very cloudy.”  Actually, it’s not.  There is an absolute dearth of evidence that Lincoln was anything but straight.  If Kushner wants to write about a gay president, he’d be better served going back just one term, to James Buchanan – but Hollywood has no interest in portraying America’s worst president as “Mrs. Buchanan,” the underground nickname carried by our 15^th president.

I spent last week with my wife in Europe.  We spent a few days of that time in Italy, most in Rome, doing all of the touristy sight-seeing: the Coliseum, the Vatican, the Spanish Steps.  Essentially, we retraced Audrey Hepburn’s route in Roman Holiday.

And, of course, my wife wanted to buy a souvenir.  So we toured the myriad street markets of Rome, where street vendors hawked their wares: knockoff purses, paintings, cheap trinkets.  Despite the troubles with the euro, the dollar still compares poorly in terms of value (current exchange rate: 1 Euro to 1.3 dollars), so everything was relatively expensive.  But the markets were packed, and with good reason: Italy’s real economy is these off-books markets, paid for in cash.

Some economists estimate that a full 50% of the Italian economy is the black market.  Even the Fodor’s tour book is stunned by the sheer size of this underground market: “if the highest estimates are correct, Italy’s black market is about as large as the entire economy of Switzerland or Indonesia.  If the estimated black-market figures were added to the official GDP, Italy would likely leapfrog France, the U.K., and China to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.”  This has, of course, been a problem for Italy since the end of World War II; in 1951, Time reported, “Tax collecting in Italy is a cat & mouse game, well understood by both sides.  Italian taxpayers declare only a tiny fraction of their true incomes; the government in return automatically triples whatever declaration the taxpayer makes.”

There’s a reason the black market is so large in Italy: it’s the only way anybody can survive.  Housing prices in Rome are egregiously high, and taxes are even more extreme: the individual income tax rate tops out at 43%, and the corporate tax rate is 31.4%.  There’s also a 20% value added tax (sales tax).  No wonder so many businesses in Italy don’t open every day – why bother, when the government will punish you for obeying the law in the form of confiscatory taxation?

And yet Italy still can’t pay for its massive social safety net.  Italy’s debt to GDP ratio is now 120%.  Its average age is well above 40, and there is no robust new generation of children on the way.  Rome has become a gorgeous relic, not just in architecture, but in population.

While we were in Italy, the government had to ram through a $40.3 billion austerity measure; this week, they were only able to raise $9 billion in bond sales.  The government dumped its inflation-pegged payments to pensioners, which means that seniors effectively took what the Reuters called an “income cut” – though those seniors are not being paid for anything but sitting around drinking espresso.  In fact, pension age was raised to 66 by 2018 and incentives were put in place to keep workers employed until 70.  The Italian government also raised taxes yet again, this time in the form of a 1.5% tax on money sent back to Italy; the government also wants to raise the VAT another 2%.  So apparently, the solution to a horrible tax system driving people into an underground economy is to raise taxes.  The Italian government’s new slogan: veni, vidi, I tributarium.

I’ve been spending my Christmas vacation with my wife in Rome and London. We arrived in London on Christmas Eve.  It’s truly an amazing city – everywhere you look, there’s history, from the Tower of London to the Churchill Museum.  But everywhere you look, there is a more ominous presence: Islam.

Now, no less a personage than Prime Minister David Cameron has already admitted that the integration of Muslims into British society has failed dramatically.  In February 2011, Cameron stated,

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.  We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.

That failure of integration is clear from the get-go.  There are official signs translated into Arabic for those who do not wish to speak or read English.  The chatter of Islamic languages is as prevalent as the mother tongue. The hijab is omnipresent.

Perhaps all this might be a charming byproduct of multiculturalism if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the Islamic population of Great Britain is radicalized.  That radicalization is not difficult to spot.

With all the major official sites closed the day after Christmas, my wife and I headed over to Madame Tussaud’s to take in the famed tourist trap.  As we strolled the halls filled with famous cultural figures, most from the 20th century, we came across the wax doll for Albert Einstein.  And there, crowded around the figure, stood five young Muslims – two male, three female.  While other guests stood next to the model and smiled, or put an arm around it, these Muslim worthies stood next to the wax model – and put their hands around its throat, simulating strangling it.  At first, I couldn’t believe what I was watching – did Einstein do something to offend these people? – but then it dawned on me that they were doing this because Einstein was a Jew.  In fact, Einstein was the only prominent Jew in Tussaud’s.  And who wouldn’t want to strangle a prominent Jew, after all?

That suspicion was confirmed a few minutes later when we reached the wax statue of Adolf Hitler.  Britons and Americans tried to choke the figure, or pointed their fingers at it in imaginary guns, or yelled at it.  These young Muslims happily stood next to it, and took smiling photographs with it as though they’d stumbled upon a friendly uncle. Which, in a way, they had.

And, of course, nobody said anything to these delightfully diverse young people. Mustn’t show evidence of that old, imperialist spirit, you know.

But that old imperialist spirit hides beneath the surface nonetheless. While visiting the Tower of London, my wife and I followed a Beefeater on a tour.  He was former British military, and acted it. Great Britain, he announced, was the greatest country on earth.  It had civilized half the globe. There was a reason, he said, that Great Britain was the only country to preface its name with the word “Great.”  When an Australian audience member asked about the Great Barrier Reef, he answered slyly, “You only know about it because we bumped into it on the way to founding your country.”  These comments were accompanied by a slightly uncomfortable laughter amongst the natives – but it was good to hear that somewhere, deep down, the British are still British.

The Washington Post recently reported that fewer and fewer Americans are getting married.  “Just 51 percent of all adults who are 18 and older are married, placing them on the brink of becoming a minority,” reported the Post.  “That represents a steep drop from 57 percent who were married in 2000.”

Is the country better off for our lack of marriage?  Clearly not.  Our demographics are in decline.  Many of our most talented folks are not generating talented offspring.

The better question, then, is why we’ve thrown away marriage in the first place.  Looking at men’s perspective on marriage is useless here – men will generally pursue multiple women rather than monogamy if given the choice.  Marriage is actually a matriarchal institution, imposed by women, for the benefit of women and children.  Men benefit, too – but only after the fact.

So what happened to women?  Why did they reject marriage?

Feminists celebrate the end of marriage as a wonderful way of liberating the female sex.  What the feminists were truly seeking was not to liberate women from men, however – they were seeking to liberate women from children.  Sex, said the feminists, was a biological urge.  But children are a patriarchal colonization of the womb.

Hence the Sex in the City mentality.  Women have been told they can have it all.  They can wait past their childbearing prime to even look for a man; they can live with a multitude of men and still hope to settle down with Mr. Big.  And, when they’re 40 or so, if they really want to, they can have an accessory baby, foist it off on the South American maid, and then head off to pilates to remain shapely and toned.

This, of course, is a fantasy. The women who live the Sex and the City reality are less happy than those who buy into those old truisms about love, marriage, and the baby carriage.  Polls consistently show that married women with children are happier than their single counterparts.  Married women live longer than single women.  Single and divorced women are far more likely to be victims of crime than married women.  Married women have more sex than single women.  Women who have children earlier – between the ages of 27 and 36 – are happier than those who wait until later to do so.

This week, the Saudi government executed a woman they accused of being a sorceress.  This marked the 73^rd beheading this year in Saudi Arabia. Liberals who call Rick Perry a monster for sanctioning the execution of 13 murderers in Texas this year yawn at the multicultural exoticism of the sheikhs who wield axes in the desert.  If only Perry spoke Arabic and threatened to kill Jews, or performed regular clitorectomies rather than mandating Gardisil, or chopped people’s heads off with a large sword rather than using lethal injection, he’d perhaps be less morally objectionable.

But the execution of the alleged sorceress in Saudi Arabia raises another question.  If there are such people able to conjure why don’t we save them from death and bring them over here to practice a little white magic on our financial system.

For three long years now, we’ve been practicing financial sorcery of our own with incomparably more evil consequences than anything these alleged desert witches have accomplished.   Conjure money out of thin air and hand it to poor people, and voilà: phantom jobs.  Ratchet up spending by turning one dollar bills into hundred dollars bills, and abracadabra: the deficit’s been decreased.

How does any of this work?  Who knows?  Like any good sorceress, the Obama administration will never reveal the secrets of their dark art.  They will, however, claim the disappearance of jobs on their watch has been an illusion.  When Obama waves his hand again, we’ll get the prestige: the jobs will reappear.

In fact, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, sneered at Gretchen Carlson of Fox News: “You just said the unemployment rate is going up since Obama took office, and it hasn’t … Unemployment is nearing right around where it was when President Obama took office and it’s dropping.”  Obama has apparently convinced his supporters that his magic is working—the magic of magical thinking.

The real unemployment rate in the country – the rate based on the number of people working in 2007 – is at 11 percent.  Even Obama supporter Ezra Klein of the Washington Post had to admit, “Remember that the unemployment rate is not ‘how many people don’t have jobs?’, but ‘how many people don’t have jobs and are actively looking for them?’ Let’s say you’ve been looking fruitlessly for five months and realize you’ve exhausted every job listing in your area. Discouraged, you stop looking, at least for the moment. According to the government, you’re no longer unemployed. Congratulations?”  As Klein points out, if you count those who are underemployed – people who are working less than full time jobs – the real unemployment rate is actually “near 20 percent.”

A little bit of financial sleight of hand, and 20 percent becomes 11 percent becomes 8 percent. Huzzah! … I guess.

This week, the Obama Administration made an announcement regarding the attack on Fort Hood in 2009.  In that incident, you’ll recall, gentle Muslim psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan – who had apparently been taking Islamic training from gentle Muslim terrorist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki – picked up a handgun and proceeded to murder 12 soldiers (one pregnant) and one Army civilian employee; another 29 were injured.  None of the soldiers were armed.  Finally, a civilian police sergeant put Hasan down with five shots, paralyzing the gentle Muslim from the chest down.

Two years later, President Obama’s Defense Department called this incident “workplace violence.”  You know, like when you punch a guy at the water cooler for sleeping with your wife. Except you’re a Muslim and there are forty co-workers, none of whom have slept with your wife, and you’re trying to shoot them to death while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!”

There is a legitimate debate to be had regarding the terminology we use to describe Muslim terrorists.  Are they Muslims or are they Islamists?  Are they radical Muslims, or are they just normal Muslims?  Robert Spencer and Andrew McCarthy have had this debate for several weeks, most prominently at the Freedom Center Restoration Weekend.  I come down on the side that says we have no business making a distinction between Muslims and so-called Islamists, since Muslims make no such distinction themselves.  Osama Bin Laden knows more about Islam than I do.  I’ll take his word for it.

But regardless of where you come down on the question of Muslim semantics, there is no doubt that Islam must come into play when we discuss the threat of terrorism.  Labeling Fort Hood “workplace violence” is like labeling September 11 a “building collapse.”  It’s not just misleading, it’s sick.

What would drive the Obama Administration to place this absurd Orwellian label on a Muslim terrorist attack?  There are two rationales: fear and hope.

First, fear.  The Defense Department is deathly afraid of funding cuts – and with good reason, since it is clear that Democrats are far less interested in cutting Granny’s Medicare than in cutting missile defense (a position that no doubt has Vladimir Putin grinning in his sleep).  So the military must please the left.  They’ve done that by turning the military into a social experimentation center where male sexuality is injected into barracks.  Now they’re doing it by upholding the diversity meme.  As General George Casey, the army’s top officer, said in the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre, “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength.  And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Now, I’m fairly certain that the murder of pregnant women is worse than people accurately labeling Nidal Hasan a Muslim terrorist.  And I’m fairly certain that General Casey knows that.  But General Casey also knows where his bread is buttered, and so does the entire Defense Department.

The old saw says that Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.  And that when voting liberal, they look for an ethnically familiar face to make them feel comfortable.

That’s why Hillary pretended to have Jewish roots when she was running for Senate from New York (in reality, the only Jew she knew in childhood was the second husband of her non-Jewish maternal grandmother).  That’s why John Kerry harped on the fact that his daddy was Jewish (although his family had converted to Roman Catholicism two generations before).

And that’s why every Democrat administration goes out of its way to show that it is chock full of liberal Jews.  Rahm Emanuel’s presence in the White House was somehow supposed to compensate for the fact that the Obama Administration is rabidly anti-Israel (despite the protestations of Obama shill Jeffrey Goldberg).  Madeleine Albright’s anti-Israel bias was supposed to be alleviated by her Jewish ancestry, although she didn’t give a damn about Judaism.

The active anti-Jewishness from the majority of American Jews allows President Obama to staff up with Jews who betray Jewishness at every turn.  First there was Emanuel, who spent his time threatening groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), telling them that if they didn’t push Israel to make concessions, Obama would let Iran go nuclear.

Newt Gingrich, like a pumpkin hurled from a slingshot, has catapulted into the lead in the GOP nomination race.  He’s up in Iowa, South Carolina, and Florida.  Unlike Mitt Romney, he has no Enthusiasm Gap.  The base is happy with Newt – or as happy as they’re going to get – and they’re begging to see him in a debate with Obama; Obama-Newt would be Mayweather-Pacquaio, with Newt as Mayweather.

The question the GOP establishment continues to ask, however, is whether Newt is electable.  Now, predictions of electability have been dicey for the GOP establishment of late: Dole and McCain were both establishment candidates.  And even the successful GOP establishment candidates like George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush implode on reaching power, handing over the reins to radicals like Clinton and Obama.  So let’s take the GOP bigwig political forecasts with a grain of salt.

But the question itself is a good one.  Newt has so much personal baggage, he’d be better off buying American Airlines entirely than trying to check it; he’s got a history of trying to outthink the room, even if his initial instincts are conservative.  None of that will truly matter in a general election, because Newt is the Walking Dead of candidates: he’s been shot repeatedly, but won’t go down.  He’s like Swiss cheese – another hole won’t matter.  In fact, it will take a precisely calibrated character shot to take him down.

Unfortunately, this is where he’s vulnerable.  He’s not all that vulnerable on the womanizing front – if Republicans can get over it, so too can independents.  He is vulnerable on the personality front.

The liberal playbook for conservative candidates is simple: they’re either stupid, corrupt, or mean.  The easier it is for liberals to mash conservatives into that mold, the easier it is for liberals to sink them.

“Stupid” is a tough charge to fight off.  The left consistently attacked George W. Bush as a dummy – but believe it or not, it was tough for the left to label him dumb, since he had better grades and credentials than Al Gore and John Kerry.  The left attacked Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce,” but the rest of America didn’t see it.  When the label seems to fit, however unfairly, it’s deadly: see Perry, Rick, or Ford, Gerald.

Then there’s “corrupt.”  Dick Cheney was supposedly corrupt – “Halliburton!  Halliburton!”  Nixon was corrupt, even if he didn’t do anything LBJ and JFK hadn’t done before him.  Corruption is easier to overcome than stupidity as a label, because the burden of proof seems to lie with those charging corruption.  That’s why the charge stuck with Nixon but didn’t really stick with Cheney.

Last week, on Thanksgiving, President Obama delivered a message to the American people.  It ran eleven paragraphs and 503 words.  None of those words was God.  Obama thanked the men and women who defend the country; he thanked volunteers at soup kitchens.  All of that is well and good.  Thanksgiving is about celebrating community.  But more than anything, it’s about celebrating the benevolence of God.

At least that’s what George Washington said in declaring it a national holiday.  The day of Thanksgiving, he stated, was to “be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be– That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks–for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation …”

Upon seeing Obama’s God-less message, I tweeted, “Unreal that Obama doesn’t mention God in Thanksgiving message. Militant atheist. To whom does he think we are giving thanks?”

The “militant atheist” part of the tweet was based not only on Obama’s omission from the Thanksgiving message.  It was based on Obama’s long history of dislike for religion: his comment that small town Americans are bitter folks who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment”; his speeches in which he portrayed the Bible as out of touch and ridiculous, suggesting that the Sermon on the Mount would force the shutdown of the Defense Department; his support for radical Muslims at the expense of Coptic Christians in Egypt; the list goes on.

My tweet, needless to say, caused consternation on the left.  Aside from the usual nutcases who cannot write anything without four-letter words, liberal outlets like Mediaite and Gawker suggested I was crazy for mentioning Obama’s comments.

This wasn’t just the Obama Defense Mechanism kicking in.  This was something larger than mere politics.

On Sunday, I sat down to watch the Denver Broncos play the San Diego Chargers. I noticed the same sort of virulent anger as I had experienced after tweeting – only this time, it was directed at Denver QB Tim Tebow.  Now, Tebow isn’t the world’s greatest quarterback.  He’s not Aaron Rodgers or even Ben Roethlisberger.  He’s a mediocre passer and a good runner; he’s a possession QB.  He wins.  And he’s always polite.

Young people spend their time in college getting high, getting drunk, and getting off.  So why shouldn’t they major in it?  This seems to be the philosophy of Yale University, where a doctoral candidate is leading a course titled “Dance Music and Nightlife Culture in New York City.”  The class includes DJ speakers, trips to chic clubs Le Bain and the Boom Boom Room, and a seminar on “Looks, Doors and Guest Lists: Getting Past the Velvet Rope.”  The teacher, Madison Moore, says he’s worried “about whether people will think this is serious.  But it’s not just about getting drunk. It’s about the history of it, the Harlem cabarets, understanding race, gender, sex, Prohibition and the law.”  For just the bargain basement price of $53,070per annum, you can attend Yale and partake in such glorious and insightful learning.

With a $200,000+ degree in Clubbing, no wonder so many college students are joining Occupy Wall Street, where they are calling for jobs commensurate with their educational achievements.  The problem is this: they already have jobs commensurate with their educational achievements.  They are sitting in a park doing nothing for no pay.  Sounds fair when all you know how to do is bat your eyelashes at bouncers.

It used to be that attending college was for those who wanted white collar jobs, who wanted higher training in English, math, or science.  It was for people who wanted to be professors and engineers, lawyers and doctors.  And there was no stigma attached to not going to college – there was nothing wrong with being a plumber or a hairdresser or a welder.  In fact, often you could make better money doing those things than being a desk jockey or a paper-pusher.

Many of our best presidents didn’t go to college.  Many of those who did went to Podunk colleges and got degrees in non-prestigious areas of learning.  Today, anyone who doesn’t attend college is seen as a redneck or an idiot.

The greatest facilitator of the “everyone to college” mindset was the worst president of the twentieth century, Lyndon Baines Johnson (yes, he was worse than Jimmy Carter).  Johnson signed into law the Higher Education Act of 1965, which was designed to build tons of new colleges and get more and more Americans into college.  Why?  Well, said Johnson, “It clearly signals this Nation’s determination to give all of our youth the education they deserve, and as long as we have a government, that government is going to take its stand to battle the ancient enemies of mankind, illiteracy and poverty and disease, and in that battle each of you are soldiers who wear the badge of honor.”

It’s now 46 years later, and we’re no closer to defeating illiteracy, poverty, or disease.  As it turns out, most people are literate long before they get to higher education – according to UNESCO, over 95% of adults were already literate in the US by 1940.  Average life expectancy in 1965 was just over 70; today, it’s about 78.  In the 45 years between 1920 and 1965, the life expectancy jumped from 54 to 70, or about twice as much.  So we haven’t quite defeated that disease thing.  As for poverty?  Today, more Americans are dependent on government than ever before in our history.  Millions are on food stamps.  In 1965, the poverty rate was 17%; today, it’s almost 15%.  So much for education as cure-all.

Last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on NBC.  As she walked onstage the pathetically unfunny comedy show – Fallon is so horrifically unfunny that he uncomfortably laughs at his own jokes onstage – the house band, The Roots, played “Lyin’ Ass Bitch.”  Bachmann didn’t catch it.  The Media Research Center and John Nolte at Big Hollywood did.  And it’s reprehensible.

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, a member of the band (his moniker was likely garnered when his parents watched Dragon Quest and Love Story back to back), released a statement: “The performance was a tongue-in-cheek and spur of the moment decision. The show was not aware of it and I feel bad if her feelings were hurt.  That was not my intention.”

Seriously?  Not his intention?  Of course that was his intention.  Would he have played that song for Michelle Obama, who received scads of media sympathy when she was booed at a NASCAR event?  Or Hillary Clinton, who, if anyone, could accurately be labeled “lyin’ ass”?  Or how about Janet Napolitano, who spent this week using the Department of Homeland Security to warn Americans of the evils of turkey frying?

But those women are Democrats.  Bachmann is a Republican, and therefore cannon fodder for the idiotic musician, who has spent his life hanging out with racist Nation of Islam colleagues and tweeting idiocies like this one, in the aftermath of the killing of Osama Bin Laden: “I hope those rejoicing can hear O’s words that to engage in anti Islam/Muslim rhetoric is missing the point.”  Questlove, by the way, affixes to his Twitter account a photoshopped picture of himself standing next to Obama.

Jimmy Fallon apologized on Twitter for the debacle, stating, “I’m honored that @MicheleBachmann was on our show yesterday and I’m so sorry about the intro mess.  I really hope she comes back.”  He could ensure she comes back by canning this Questlove character.  But he won’t do that, lest he be seen as racist.  In the television world, it’s one thing to let a musician belittle a major American female politician in a blatantly sexist way.  It’s another thing to fire a black guy for doing the belittling.

But this is how it works in the world of late night.  The last election cycle saw the late night hosts go into overdrive for the Obama election campaign.  Between January 1, 2008 and July 31, 2008, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and David Letterman made a grand total of 169 jokes about Obama, compared with 428 about Bush and 328 about McCain.  Comedy Central comedians were more even – Colbert made 129 jokes about McCain to 91 for Obama, and Stewart made more jokes about Obama than McCain, although the vast majority of jokes about Obama were fawning compliments and the vast majority about McCain were brutal slams.