This list post was originally published here in January.

I write a lot about conservative talk radio, so (alas) I have to keep track of the Left’s hair-raising, borderline insane attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other hosts.

Here’s a round up of some of the biggest and craziest (unsuccessful) campaigns to destroy these powerful and popular pundits.

First up: the latest attempt to brand a talk radio host a “racist” fails miserably…

#5 “Monkey hear, monkey don’t”

Did you hear about the racist redneck talk radio host who referred to African-American students as “monkeys”?

The truth is: he didn’t.

Earlier this month, while criticizing his city’s dysfunctional public school system, WSPD’s Brian Wilson said:

“But certainly, teaching little monkeys to peel bananas and so on and them learning to do it correctly on cue does not mean that they’ve learned everything except a funny parlor trick.”

If you don’t see anything “racist” in those remarks, you’re not alone. The city’s public school system isn’t even overwhelmingly African-American; it’s 41% white and 8% Hispanic.

Nevertheless, the local newspaper, the Toledo Blade, easily convinced a gaggle of professional race-baiters to condemn Wilson’s imaginary bigotry. Then the trumped up “controversy” led to a public demonstration, with outraged protesters demanding an apology from the station.

Most predictably of all? When Wilson’s defenders pointed out that his 14-second clip had been purposely wrenched out of context, the Blade – which had run the “story” on four consecutive front pages — refused to admit they’d made a monkey out of a molehill.

Instead, the editors kept piling on, pointing out that, “Mr. Wilson doesn’t limit incendiary remarks to the airwaves. Atop his Web site is a picture of a microphone aflame.”

(Did I mention that the name of the crusading newspaper is… the Toledo Blade?)

Thanks to persistent pressure from the city’s alternative paper, the “story” is finally unraveling, but only after two weeks of daily character assassinations, and stubborn rumors of Wilson’s looming dismissal. (He still has his job.)

As the Toledo Free Press put it in their invaluable postmortem of the smear campaign:

“Toledo is not the hub of industry it once was, but if The Blade continues to manufacture stories like its recent Brian Wilson series, the Glass City’s production will rival Pittsburgh’s during the steel boom.”

Next: onto two big names — but only one big brain…

Here’s all you need to know about Canada:

When Canadian author Mordecai Richler died a few years ago, the crusty, controversial author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version was duly eulogized on the front page of the nation’s newest paper, the National Post. (It didn’t hurt that the Post employed three — count ‘em! — of Richler’s talented children — but his death was a no-brainer A1 headline at every other Canadian newspaper, too.)

The next day, a different, equally glowing obit also praised Mordecai Richler — on the front page of the New York Times.

The day after that? News of that almost unheard of hono(u)r — a Canadian writer, memorialized on page one of The Paper of Record! — was breathlessly reported…

On the front page of the National Post.

And that is the only story you ever need to know, to completely understand Canada, your neighbor to the north (with a “u”.)

Oh, and one other thing:

Last night, the country’s first “conservative” 24-hour news channel, the Sun News Network, went on the air at 5PM sharp.

I’m obliged to note that I’m friendly with a few of the folks who host programs on the new network.

That said: I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one who got a little thrill watching Sun News’ “countdown clock” tick-tick-tick yesterday. (Yes, some folks videotaped the countdown clock for posterity. What can I say? That’s how desperate Canadians were for change, and how thrilled they were that it was on its way.)

When  5:00PM finally arrived and Ezra Levant greeted his viewers, I was delighted. Americans who remember the days before Fox News and the internet can probably identify with that feeling.

Our state-sponsored TV channel, the CBC, is supported by my tax dollars, rabidly anti-American and anti-Israel — and, a blessing of sorts, extremely low rated.

Other stations range from left-middle to left-left. Often this is more a case of self-selection than ideology; Canada’s media centers are our big cities, and people in big cities are typically “progressive. Their passion for “Earth Hour” and Cuban vacations and “mulitculturalism” is simply “normal.” Chances are, they’ve never met a gun owner, a climate “skeptic,” a practicing Christian, an opponent of “gay marriage” — or a Conservative Party voter.

Having said that, watching Sun News the first day still felt a bit like dutifully showing up to a pal’s new “little theatre” production of The Music Man, or your child’s Christmas pageant. You’re kind of pre-cringing, waiting for part of the set to fall over.

Yet I’m betting many of us were pleasantly surprised. Much of the on-air talent comes from the world of print; sometimes it shows (guys, they’re called “haircuts”…) but, delightfully, sometimes it doesn’t. Everyone deserves a medal just for going on TV live, to a national audience, in a recently constructed studio on its very first day.

Wow!

As the show biz bible Variety reminded us this morning, not everybody is happy with the very existence of Sun News.

As I reported here months back, Canada’s self-appointed guardians of the nation’s “values” — Establishment elites like Margaret Atwood and major newspaper columnists — tried to keep Sun News off the air before it even launched.

They didn’t succeed, obviously. And I predict that after about a week of cursing on Twitter, most of them will forget all about it and go back to fretting about the upcoming national election and the latest made-up quote attributed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Those of us who remain tuned in, meanwhile, are happy to hear phrases like “free market economics” and “low taxes” uttered on Canadian TV without eye-rolling and sarcasm.

Of everything I saw last night, nothing moved me more than Charles Adler’s opening monologue. Adler is one of our biggest talk radio hosts. He’s a TV veteran from way back, though (with the local Emmy to prove it). I’ve been sending everyone over to the Sun News website to see his stirring welcome to his new audience, in which he shares the story of his father smuggling him, as a baby, out of Communist Hungary in a knapsack:

We took a risk for freedom, for democracy… for Canada.

It’s a moving meditation on common sense values, success, risk taking and being part of a challenging (ad)venture in a new era. Hope you’ll give it a few minutes of your time.

Naturally, the channel’s first real “controversy” came at the instigation of host Ezra Levant.

At the behest of a foreign-born imam, Levant was famously prosecuted by the Alberta government in 2006 for publishing the so-called “Mohammed cartoons.” Yesterday, by way of introduction, he showed them on his program.

And — you’ll never guess — an imam complained!

The imam, a convert named Stephen Rockwell, issued a bizarre statement invoking the Holocaust, making soap out of Jews, and the n-word.

Plus — you’ll never guess — he declined Ezra’s invitation to appear on the show today. Levant informed viewers tonight that he was going to put up a photograph of Rockwell for their benefit, but “didn’t want to frighten” them.

As a self-described troublemaker and media veteran going back to his college days, Ezra Levant is in his element. Other on-air folks aren’t as seasoned, but they’re — for lack of a gentler word — ideologically sound. Sun News scooped up almost all the nation’s openly conservative commentators in print and radio. I predict veteran Parliament Hill reporter Brian Lilley and hyperarticulate high finance expert (and children’s author!) Theo Caldwell will be the channel’s breakout stars.

So, American readers: please congratulate us, and keep your fingers crossed. If you catch clips from Sun News on the internet, do cut us some slack; we don’t have the economies of scale, and sheer capital, to launch something as visually fancy as Fox. But Sun’s heart and mind is in the right place. Millions of us are thrilled and relieved.

As my fellow Canadian blogger, Kate McMillan posted triumphantly this morning:

April 18th, 2011: The day a whole new stratum of Canadian society learned what it’s like to yell at the TV

Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political philosopher of dubious repute, who remains, in spite of his errors and failed predictions, the Left’s “rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our sensei.”

This week at CounterContempt, David Stein announced the release of letters he says shed harsh light on one of Chomsky’s most troubling associations: his literary relationship with a Holocaust denier.

As Stein explains:

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, leftist author, professor, and anti-Israel activist Noam Chomsky became embroiled in what would become known as “The Faurisson Affair.” In 1979, a professor of literature at the University of Lyon, Robert Faurisson, was fined by a French court for claiming in Le Monde that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Chomsky, a rabid critic of Israel, was asked by a friend of Faurisson’s to sign a petition supporting Faurisson’s right to free speech. The petition did not mention Faurisson’s views; it merely defended his right to express them.

I should relate here that I share Chomsky’s disinterested, “absolute free speech” philosophy, which I would summarize artlessly as “let a thousand morons bloom.” (I don’t even believe in libel laws.)

As we learned to our dismay here in Canada, singling out Holocaust denial for special punishment not only turned obscure dingbats into household names; that same quasi-legal mechanism was eventually used by Muslims to persecute Jews and those with, shall we say, suspiciously Jewish-sounding names — such as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. (Had Steyn’s surname been “Smith,” I’m convinced his writings would never have attracted the attention of the Canadian Islamic Congress.)

In fact, Chomsky’s widely distributed condemnation of our “Human Rights Commissions” marked a turning point in our battle against state-sponsored, politically correct censorship.

However, Chomsky did more than just sign a petition defending a professor’s right to express questionable, controversial opinions back in 1979. (And who can blame him? That same freedom has made Chomsky himself relatively wealthy…)

Chomsky then wrote an essay explaining to his critics why he defended Faurisson’s right to free expression  — again, understandable and defensible as an expression of abstract principles that reasonable men have disagreed upon for centuries.

It was after that, as CounterContempt’s backgrounder explains, that things got messy:

Chomsky’s essay was used by a [Holocaust] denial publishing house as a preface for a book about Faurisson. Chomsky admitted that he had issued the essay with no restrictions regarding how it could be used, but he claimed to have asked the deniers to refrain from using it in their book. According to Chomsky, his request arrived too late, and the book (with the Chomsky preface) was published.

And that was that. Chomsky has continued, for the past thirty years, to defend his role in L’Affaire Faurisson. His defense always consists of the same points: His lack of knowledge of Faurisson’s work, and (more importantly) his absolute, total lack of interest in Holocaust denial. Chomsky has stressed, time and again, that the subject doesn’t interest him, and that he doesn’t care about, nor does he have knowledge of, anything the deniers say or write.

In short, Chomsky’s defense can be paraphrased as, ‘Look, I helped a guy out because I don’t believe in government censorship. I don’t care who he was; I’d have helped anyone in the same way. And now it’s done and I have no interest in knowing anything about who this guy is or what he believes in.’

Then CounterContempt drops the hammer:

…according to recently uncovered documents, that’s simply not true.

CounterContempt has released two letters which they say are a sampling of correspondence showing that Chomsky’s relationship with Holocaust deniers was more serious than he has let on.

These letters are between Chomsky and L.A. “Lou” Rollins, “a writer and contributing editor at the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the North American headquarters of Holocaust denial and Nazi literature.”

Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political philosopher of dubious repute, who remains, in spite of his errors and failed predictions, the Left’s “rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our sensei.”

This week at CounterContempt, David Stein announced the release of letters he says shed harsh light on one of Chomsky’s most troubling associations: his literary relationship with a Holocaust denier.

As Stein explains:

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, leftist author, professor, and anti-Israel activist Noam Chomsky became embroiled in what would become known as “The Faurisson Affair.” In 1979, a professor of literature at the University of Lyon, Robert Faurisson, was fined by a French court for claiming in Le Monde that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Chomsky, a rabid critic of Israel, was asked by a friend of Faurisson’s to sign a petition supporting Faurisson’s right to free speech. The petition did not mention Faurisson’s views; it merely defended his right to express them.

I should relate here that I share Chomsky’s disinterested, “absolute free speech” philosophy, which I would summarize artlessly as “let a thousand morons bloom.” (I don’t even believe in libel laws.)

As we learned to our dismay here in Canada, singling out Holocaust denial for special punishment not only turned obscure dingbats into household names; that same quasi-legal mechanism was eventually used by Muslims to persecute Jews and those with, shall we say, suspiciously Jewish-sounding names — such as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. (Had Steyn’s surname been “Smith,” I’m convinced his writings would never have attracted the attention of the Canadian Islamic Congress.)

In fact, Chomsky’s widely distributed condemnation of our “Human Rights Commissions” marked a turning point in our battle against state-sponsored, politically correct censorship.

However, Chomsky did more than just sign a petition defending a professor’s right to express questionable, controversial opinions back in 1979. (And who can blame him? That same freedom has made Chomsky himself relatively wealthy…)

Chomsky then wrote an essay explaining to his critics why he defended Faurisson’s right to free expression  — again, understandable and defensible as an expression of abstract principles that reasonable men have disagreed upon for centuries.

It was after that, as CounterContempt’s backgrounder explains, that things got messy:

Chomsky’s essay was used by a [Holocaust] denial publishing house as a preface for a book about Faurisson. Chomsky admitted that he had issued the essay with no restrictions regarding how it could be used, but he claimed to have asked the deniers to refrain from using it in their book. According to Chomsky, his request arrived too late, and the book (with the Chomsky preface) was published.

And that was that. Chomsky has continued, for the past thirty years, to defend his role in L’Affaire Faurisson. His defense always consists of the same points: His lack of knowledge of Faurisson’s work, and (more importantly) his absolute, total lack of interest in Holocaust denial. Chomsky has stressed, time and again, that the subject doesn’t interest him, and that he doesn’t care about, nor does he have knowledge of, anything the deniers say or write.

In short, Chomsky’s defense can be paraphrased as, ‘Look, I helped a guy out because I don’t believe in government censorship. I don’t care who he was; I’d have helped anyone in the same way. And now it’s done and I have no interest in knowing anything about who this guy is or what he believes in.’

Then CounterContempt drops the hammer:

…according to recently uncovered documents, that’s simply not true.

CounterContempt has released two letters which they say are a sampling of correspondence showing that Chomsky’s relationship with Holocaust deniers was more serious than he has let on.

These letters are between Chomsky and L.A. “Lou” Rollins, “a writer and contributing editor at the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the North American headquarters of Holocaust denial and Nazi literature.”

CounterContempt opines that this is a “very friendly correspondence, complete with praise for the denier’s work, and an offer of assistance on Chomsky’s part.”

In one of the letters dated March 10, 1984, from Chomsky to Rollins, we read the following:

I’m very glad to hear that you are writing about Elie Wiesel, who is one of the major frauds of our time. His attitude towards Israel is essentially the same as that of the Communist party members towards the USSR, or of ‘good Germans’ towards the Nazis. (…)

Wiesel’s “shameful subservience to the State of Israel,” Chomsky continues, is a “stance” that is “all the more grotesque in his case because of the pretense of saintliness. It may be, however, that many people are aware of his exploitation of the Holocaust.”

Mark Steyn sat in for Rush Limbaugh on Monday, and among other things, he mused about the Eminem/Chrysler Super Bowl ad (Steyn’s audio is below).

The TV spot purports to celebrate everything that once made Detroit great — and will make it great again, presumably if American taxpayers continue to throw money at (or is that down?) that urban hellhole.

(You paid $9 million for that commercial, by the way — Chrysler was one of the bailout beneficiaries, remember? Oh, and I helped: they got some Canadian assistance as well. Being Canadian born and a U.S. resident, that makes Mark Steyn doubly entitled — if you’ll permit me to use a word Detroit residents are all too familiar with — to his rant.)

Steyn joked grimly that Eminem and his director managed to find the only theater still standing in the Motor City — the city’s more majestic ones have been reduced to abandoned rubble, like so many of its homes and businesses, as famously captured on various websites with names like “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.”

Detroit crumbled to dust, says Steyn, not because it was bombed by foreign enemies — but because it was “run” by Democrats and unions for generations.

Steyn called Detroit: “The perfect emblem of America at the dawn of the 21st century” — a ruined city that looks like “a banana republic after a coup” is now being held up as a model for the rest of the country to emulate.

It’s the sort of thing conservatives have been saying to each other for years. (While those “ruins of Detroit” photos have recently gone mainstream/viral, a couple of websites had been serving them up for a decade. They weren’t news to me, at least.)

However, apparently nobody in Detroit has ever heard anyone blame the obvious culprits for its own demise. And Steyn, with his “elitist” accent and habit of employing expressions like “pantywaist” and “nancy boys” in between singing snatches of mid-century show tunes, managed to get under Motown’s skin like a jailhouse tattoo.

He’s spent the last 24 hours doing interviews with local Detroit and national media. Dragged on the air to “explain himself” and presumably apologize, Steyn has merely doubled down, as only he can.

For instance, he’s received hundreds of illiterate (and irony deficient) emails (language warning) chastising him for mentioning the city’s embarrassing illiteracy rate, and has thus been compelled to respond:

Actually, I said that the illiteracy rate within the city limits is about 50 per cent. That being the case, I’m impressed to see that so many of the correspondents below are able to spell correctly the two-syllable word “a*****e”. Great start! You can be anything you want to be! Dream your dream!

Hilariously, one of Steyn’s most prominent critics — local radio host Frank Beckman — admitted that “he agreed with Steyn on some issues: the roots of the city’s decline lay with unions, liberal political leaders and a sense of entitlement.” (Audio.)

But his main complaint, and those of Steyn’s less articulate critics, seemed to be:

That commercial made us feel good about our lousy city for 30 seconds. Then you came along and ruined it, you fruity foreigner!

I hear crack makes you feel good for 30 seconds too.

With childish reasoning like that in evidence, (not to mention all the embarrassing displays of misplaced homophobia) the real puzzle is how the Detroit ever rose high enough to fall so low.

I always liked The Kids in the Hall. It was one of the few TV programs on the CBC that I’ve ever watched, so I didn’t resent supporting it with my extorted tax dollars. My friends and I admired The Kids’ uncanny ability to capture the mundane horrors of cubicle life at all levels, from CEO to temp, and duly adopted lots of their catchphrases.

But like their comedic counterparts at “the Corpse” (The Royal Canadian Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes), they occasionally lapsed into brainless anti-Americanism, just not as frequently.

Up here, it’s a running, well, joke that comedians are one of Canada’s major exports, starting with Wayne & Shuster (who hold the record for appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show) to Jim Carrey, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, Mike Myers and any number of SNL/National Lampoon writers.

However, The Kids never made the leap across the border, except as hipster cult favorites. Too weird, too dark, too “high concept”? Hard to say.

Now one of The Kids is finally moving to America for good, but not because he’s signed a development deal or landed a juicy role.

Having built his early career at our expense, Dave (News Radio) Foley is now decamping to the US — to escape our notoriously feminist, anti-male, “progressive” child support system.

I have mixed feelings about alimony and child support. My deadbeat dad died owing me countless thousands of dollars in support; while my mother and I lived below the poverty line, he hung out drinking at the golf course and the race track.

However, I’m also on a Canadian “father’s rights” mailing list, which has hipped me to our twisted “women are always right” justice system.

At the extreme end, women who kill get much shorter sentences than male murderers (who get ridiculously short sentences to begin with.) But every day, (non-violent) men like Dave Foley face situations like this one:

Foley explained during an interview on comedian Marc Maron’s podcast that he was recently ordered by an Ontario Family Court judge to pay his first wife and two teenage sons more than he has been able to earn.

“I’m happy to give away half my money, that would be great,” said Foley. “But I’m literally obligated to give away 400 per cent of my income, or otherwise go to jail.

“The judge even said, if I was paralyzed from the neck down, I would still be responsible for having to earn a million dollars a year.” (…)

While he was re-married to American actress Chrissy Guerrero a few years later, and the couple had a daughter in 2003, Foley said the strain of having to pay spousal and child support for his first marriage contributed to the recent dissolution of the second one.

Foley explained the latest ruling stated he remains on the hook to Southey whether or not he is able to earn the money, and whether or not he is alive.

So, for the time being, Foley has planned to hunker down in Los Angeles.

“I don’t think I would take to jail well,” he said.

(Indeed, that’s more “Buddy Cole’s” forte…)

The friend who emailed me this information about Foley thoughtfully added a video (see below) that will give you an idea of who you’re about to “welcome” into your country!

Remember: Dave Foley gets to live in the United States. And I don’t.

Just sayin’…

At least she didn’t blame Sarah Palin.

On her low-rated MSNBC show Monday night, Rachel Maddow condemned “Stephenson Billings at ChristWire.org” for writing this:

The escalating crisis in Egypt could become a defining moment for Sarah Palin. Governor Palin needs to speak out publicly and forcibly for an American-led invasion to protect our interests in North Africa.

Too bad Stephenson Billings is an imaginary person and ChristWire.org is a satirical site.

Maybe it’s because I’m Canadian, but I can’t imagine voluntarily tuning in to watch a smug, snide woman who looks like a cross between k.d. lang, and Linda Griffiths in her Pierre Trudeau drag.

But somebody’s watching Rachel “Maybe If I Talk Really Fast, People Will Think I’m Clever” Maddow, apparently, because The Atlantic Wire (note: neither a satirical site nor a “right wing” one) caught her slamming an imaginary person for daring to criticize Obama.

As The Atlantic Wire points out, two NBC affiliates, along with The Huffington Post, have also mistaken ChristWire.org for a legitimate news source, and the latter were mocked for doing so by no less than the New York Times. Speaking for everyone reading this post right now, they add:

C’mon people. Google searches! They’re not that hard.

Obliged to acknowledge her mistake, Maddow tweeted after her show Monday night, “The bad news about a free and open internet? Sometimes you get had by brilliant satirists.”

Yes, satirists are always “brilliant” when they’re mocking conservative Christians. I don’t find ChristWire.org particularly insightful or original, but then again, I’m not a “progressive.”

This morning, Business Wire reported on Maddow’s on-air mea (minima) culpa last night, and were unimpressed, to put it mildly:

After a series of clips of George W. Bush and John Boehner and then Glenn Beck raging about the new Caliphate, Christwire finally came in:

“Props to them for a brilliant piece of satire, shame on us for believing them.  But in a world where China taking over New Zealand [cue visual of Glenn Beck] is what passes for real analysis on the situation in Egypt how do we know that’s not satire too?”

Translation: Glenn Beck is so crazy, and so successful, how can I, Rachel Maddow, be expected to differentiate between him and false news stories?

Boy was that disappointing.

“Disappointing”? More like predictable and pathetic. Pushed to the wall, one of the leftist’s favorite responses is to whine impotently, “He does it too!!” Maddow’s non-apology is just another example.

PS: MSNBC removed Maddow’s embarrassing gaff from its website, but you can view it below:

Writing recently for USAToday, Harvard Law professor David B. Wilkins looked back at a disturbing, depressing event in recent American history:

During his confirmation hearings for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, Clarence Thomas famously described the news media’s treatment of the allegations that he had sexually harassed a young female co-worker during his tenure as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a “high-tech lynching.”

In Thomas’ case, the claim was little more than clever hyperbole.

Wilkins’ snide characterization of Thomas’ metaphor is fairly commonplace on the Left. You see, progressives turn antsy when conservatives “steal” two of their favorite weapons: civil disobedience and metaphors. Pro-abortion activists still resent Operation Rescue for adopting passive resistance and street theater, and leftists hamfistedly mock anyone to their right who speaks and writes using figures of speech.

And of course, they really hate it when African-Americans escape from the progressive plantation. How uppity!

Fast forward twenty years:

At a ‘progressive’ rally in Palm Springs [on January 30, 2011], [white] demonstrators called for Clarence Thomas to be hanged, stringed up, tortured, sent back to the fields, and so on.

The “Uncloaking the Kochs” rally was sponsored by Common Cause, AFFCE, The Ruckus Society, 350, Greenpeace, Code Pink, the Progressive Democrats of America, and others. The event was staged outside venue of Koch Brothers conference.

But hey, give that one lady on the video credit: at least she apologized for swearing!

I can find no evidence that “hate crime,” “hate speech” or civil rights charges were laid related to this incident.

Oddly enough!

Someone should send this tape to the Palm Springs District Attorney or equivalent and ask what s/he makes of it.

Or maybe this is a job for the FBI…

PS: According to their website at least, the Palm Springs Police Department takes “hate crimes” very seriously. They define a hate crime as:

…any unlawful action designed to frighten or harm an individual or group which is motivated because of race, religion, ethnic/national origin, sexual orientation, gender or disability of the victim.

The Palm Springs Police Department urges citizens to “report the incident immediately to the police.”

So there you have it…

At least she didn’t blame Sarah Palin.

On her low-rated MSNBC show Monday night, Rachel Maddow condemned “Stephenson Billings at ChristWire.org” for writing this:

The escalating crisis in Egypt could become a defining moment for Sarah Palin. Governor Palin needs to speak out publicly and forcibly for an American-led invasion to protect our interests in North Africa.

Too bad Stephenson Billings is an imaginary person and ChristWire.org is a satirical site.

Maybe it’s because I’m Canadian, but I can’t imagine voluntarily tuning in to watch a smug, snide woman who looks like a cross between k.d. lang, and Linda Griffiths in her Pierre Trudeau drag.

But somebody’s watching Rachel “Maybe If I Talk Really Fast, People Will Think I’m Clever” Maddow, apparently, because The Atlantic Wire (note: neither a satirical site nor a “right wing” one) caught her slamming an imaginary person for daring to criticize Obama.

As The Atlantic Wire points out, two NBC affiliates, along with The Huffington Post, have also mistaken ChristWire.org for a legitimate news source, and the latter were mocked for doing so by no less than the New York Times. Speaking for everyone reading this post right now, they add:

C’mon people. Google searches! They’re not that hard.

Obliged to acknowledge her mistake, Maddow tweeted after her show Monday night, “The bad news about a free and open internet? Sometimes you get had by brilliant satirists.”

Yes, satirists are always “brilliant” when they’re mocking conservative Christians. I don’t find ChristWire.org particularly insightful or original, but then again, I’m not a “progressive.”

This morning, Business Wire reported on Maddow’s on-air mea (minima) culpa last night, and were unimpressed, to put it mildly:

After a series of clips of George W. Bush and John Boehner and then Glenn Beck raging about the new Caliphate, Christwire finally came in:

“Props to them for a brilliant piece of satire, shame on us for believing them.  But in a world where China taking over New Zealand [cue visual of Glenn Beck] is what passes for real analysis on the situation in Egypt how do we know that’s not satire too?”

Translation: Glenn Beck is so crazy, and so successful, how can I, Rachel Maddow, be expected to differentiate between him and false news stories?

Boy was that disappointing.

“Disappointing”? More like predictable and pathetic. Pushed to the wall, one of the leftist’s favorite responses is to whine impotently, “He does it too!!” Maddow’s non-apology is just another example.

PS: MSNBC removed Maddow’s embarrassing gaff from its website, but you can view it below:

If progressives wonder why they began to falter at the end of the 20th century, I can tell them.

Analogies.

The great battles for black, workers’, and female rights having been (mostly) won. So-called “liberals” started calling themselves “progressives” at the precise moment they began, perversely, living in (and off) the past.

As the stakes got smaller — a side effect of the shift in the Left’s locus from the streets and the factory to the academy — the rhetoric became more comically overblown.

So a girl demanding admittance to an all-male military school was held up as the Rosa Parks of the Citadel. (After dragging the school through an expensive lawsuit, and winning, the stupid chick dropped out her first week).

Some New York transvestites at a Mafia-run bar got maudlin drunk after Judy Garland died then attacked some cops — and “Stonewall” was held up as synonymous with “Selma.” Baby seals were just like Bangladesh babies, with snow.

And when faced with opposition, progressives bear down and chant the names of the long dead — “Kennedy” and “King” and “McCarthy” and “Murrow” — like Macbeth’s witches.  They have to, because — if they’re presented to the general public without vintage accessories possessed of good provenance — the latest leftist causes are laughably trivial, less to do with group “rights” or even “needs” than petulant, idiosyncratic, individual “wants” and “demands.”

Whereas libertarians and conservatives accept the obvious — “A = A” — progressives insist that nothing is what it is. Word definitons are fluid. Everything is a conspiracy. Each new (idiotic) cause is the fun house mirror image of a noble, long ago moment of glory. If the left didn’t craft such analogies, the average person would never support them. But terrified of ending up on the wrong side of history, ordinary folks hesitate to laugh at the notion that two gay men picking on a Christian bed and breakfast owner are the moral equivalent of the Freedom (bareback?) Riders.

Give progressives credit: they DO claim to love recycling…

And recycling is what passes for the art of film making today. It’s bad enough that Hollywood seems incapable of producing movies that aren’t remakes, sequels and barely disguised rip offs. Why should documentaries be immune to taking the easy way out?

Later this year, Evocateur will debut, telling the story of the late Morton Downey Jr.

Aaron Barnhart of TV Barn and the Kansas City Star writes:

When I was in college in Chicago, I would listen to Downey on WMAQ, the AM country station that had recently flipped to talk and had hired the onetime singer-songwriter, then in his 50s, to stir things up. Downey had arrived by way of Sacramento, his latest stop in a long and bumpy broadcast career. He’d been fired from KFBK in 1983 for referring to a Sacramento city councilman as a “Chinaman.”

As I recall, he didn’t meet with much success at MAQ. But like Rush Limbaugh — who was hired as his replacement in Sacramento — the chain-smoking, sneering Downey just needed the right conditions in order to launch into the media stratosphere.

That turned out to be “The Morton Downey Jr. Show,” taped in Seacaucus, N.J., and a sensation in the late 1980s. Why then? Why him? Why the conditions just ripe for a Morton Downey to invade the media space with his yelling, his insults, his insane studio audience and over-the-top daily confrontations?

NewsReal readers can guess what’s coming next even before the trailer for Evocateur spells it out (with help from a talking head I believe to be Stanley Crouch):

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are the new Morton Downey Jrs. A brief montage of supposed latter-day Downeys displays pictures of Rush and Beck, but not Keith Olbermann, Rosie O’Donnell or Ed Schultz — or one-time trash TV host Geraldo Rivera.

Oddly enough.

Next: Projecting phoniness…

“It’s come to this: Cracked.com is the paper of record.”

Almost every longtime blogger seems to coin a catchphrase. Instapundit gave birth to “Heh.” My fellow Canadian blogger Kate McMillan regularly dubs chronically toxic historical figures “not dead enough.”

I started calling Cracked “the paper of record” in 2007, when I rediscovered the poor man’s MAD Magazine after it transitioned to an exclusively online presence.

I was startled by the high quality of the writing I found there. A non-fan described the evolution of Cracked as going “from MAD to Mental Floss” – and meant that as an insult. That sounds to me like an admirable trajectory.

Not only did Cracked.com make me laugh out loud (and that’s hard to do), but occasionally their pieces were thoughtful and even wise.

“David Wong,” a.k.a. Senior Editor Jason Pargin, penned an essay called “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable” that – along with “5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy, But Won’t” and “The 10 Most Important Things They Didn’t Teach You In High School” – should have earned him a chubby book contract.

Being less blatantly biased than the average hip, pop culture site, Cracked mops up the misinformation spilled by the Right and the Left — no, J. Edgar Hoover was NOT a transvestite, and the Tea Party isn’t the second coming of the Klan. Cracked’s “Magic Negro-gate: How Liberals Confused Obama with Kazaam” should have gained far more traction.

So I was deeply disappointed in late December, when Cracked published “5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam.”

Where to start?

Jacopo della Quercia’s exercise in apologetics singles out that famous phrase in the Treaty of Tripoli:

“The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Mussulmen [Moslems].”

But he neglects to mention why America needed a Treaty of Tripoli in the first place, i.e. ruthless, unprincipled Muslim pirates were the newborn United States’ first enemies, after the British. (Hence the line in the “Marine’s Hymn”…)

Quercia approvingly quotes Jefferson a lot, but leaves out something the President wrote with John Adams:

…that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

The rest of Quercia’s essay has more strawmen than Oz; no one thinks “ALL Muslim women wear veils,” for instance.

Thence begins the obligatory “Golden Age of Islam” nonsense (which is made to stretch tenuously over two segments, so the author can achieve a respectable grand total of “5 Ridiculous Things…”).

That “Golden Age” nonsense is no longer the debate-slayer it once was, and not only because anyone can find scholarly evidence of its non-existence in a matter of mere moments.

I write a lot about conservative talk radio, so (alas) I have to keep track of the Left’s hair-raising, borderline insane attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other hosts.

Here’s a round up of some of the biggest and craziest (unsuccessful) campaigns to destroy these powerful and popular pundits.

First up: the latest attempt to brand a talk radio host a “racist” fails miserably…

#5 “Monkey hear, monkey don’t”

Did you hear about the racist redneck talk radio host who referred to African-American students as “monkeys”?

The truth is: he didn’t.

Earlier this month, while criticizing his city’s dysfunctional public school system, WSPD’s Brian Wilson said:

“But certainly, teaching little monkeys to peel bananas and so on and them learning to do it correctly on cue does not mean that they’ve learned everything except a funny parlor trick.”

If you don’t see anything “racist” in those remarks, you’re not alone. The city’s public school system isn’t even overwhelmingly African-American; it’s 41% white and 8% Hispanic.

Nevertheless, the local newspaper, the Toledo Blade, easily convinced a gaggle of professional race-baiters to condemn Wilson’s imaginary bigotry. Then the trumped up “controversy” led to a public demonstration, with outraged protesters demanding an apology from the station.

Most predictably of all? When Wilson’s defenders pointed out that his 14-second clip had been purposely wrenched out of context, the Blade – which had run the “story” on four consecutive front pages — refused to admit they’d made a monkey out of a molehill.

Instead, the editors kept piling on, pointing out that, “Mr. Wilson doesn’t limit incendiary remarks to the airwaves. Atop his Web site is a picture of a microphone aflame.”

(Did I mention that the name of the crusading newspaper is… the Toledo Blade?)

Thanks to persistent pressure from the city’s alternative paper, the “story” is finally unraveling, but only after two weeks of daily character assassinations, and stubborn rumors of Wilson’s looming dismissal. (He still has his job.)

As the Toledo Free Press put it in their invaluable postmortem of the smear campaign:

“Toledo is not the hub of industry it once was, but if The Blade continues to manufacture stories like its recent Brian Wilson series, the Glass City’s production will rival Pittsburgh’s during the steel boom.”

Next: onto two big names — but only one big brain…

Issue of Cracked circa 1975

On Monday, I wrote about my disappointment when one of my favorite websites, Cracked.com, published a limp exercise in apologetics called “5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam.”

Any website posting one dopey article in three years is actually a hell of an accomplishment. I just hope its the last one of its kind.

But I’m not confident. Here’s why:

This week, one of my blog readers sent me an article from The Jewish Press by David Lev called, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman – Set To Join Muslim Superhero Crew.”

They knew I’d be interested because I’ve written before about the Jewish roots of comic books.

(And like all my countrymen, I know one of the creators of Superman was Jewish AND Canadian– because the government spent a bunch of [our] money telling us that in a [horribly written] heavy rotation PSA.)

The Jewish Press story was about “The 99,” a comic book project that NewsReal wrote about in back in December…

Superman (…) along with Batman, Aquaman, and other JLA members, will be featured in the adventures of a group called The 99.

Already a popular print product in the Gulf states, The 99 is coming to the U.S., and has even been developed into a TV series for new kids’ cable network, The Hub.

The 99 is the brainchild of Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, founder and CEO of Kuwait’s Teshkeel Media Group. The 99 consists of 99 teenagers from around the world, each of whom bears an Arabic name from the Koran that reflects one of the 99 attributes of Allah, as recorded in the Koran.

OK, so Muslims are hijacking Superman (with an assist from DC Comics, of course). No surprise. After all, Muslims are now pushing the narrative that they were the ones who discovered America.

As Dennis Miller says, “Muslims will only get interested in putting a man on the moon the day after Israel sets up shop there.” Since Muslims don’t invent anything, theft and conquest is their only semi-viable tactic.

So sad to say, not much in this depressing article shocked me. Then one word jumped out at me:

Al-Mutawa recruited several veterans of the comics industry — longtime artists who worked for DC and Marvel Comics — to work with him on The 99.

In a recent interview, he said he had a hard time convincing some of the artists to work with him, given the attitude of many Americans to Islam in the wake of 9/11.

“To assuage fears that this wasn’t an Islamist project, I bought the satire magazine ‘Cracked’…”

Terrific.

“It’s come to this: Cracked.com is the paper of record.”

Almost every longtime blogger seems to coin a catchphrase. Instapundit gave birth to “Heh.” My fellow Canadian blogger Kate McMillan regularly dubs chronically toxic historical figures “not dead enough.”

I started calling Cracked “the paper of record” in 2007, when I rediscovered the poor man’s MAD Magazine after it transitioned to an exclusively online presence.

I was startled by the high quality of the writing I found there. A non-fan described the evolution of Cracked as going “from MAD to Mental Floss” – and meant that as an insult. That sounds to me like an admirable trajectory.

Not only did Cracked.com make me laugh out loud (and that’s hard to do), but occasionally their pieces were thoughtful and even wise.

“David Wong,” a.k.a. Senior Editor Jason Pargin, penned an essay called “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable” that – along with “5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy, But Won’t” and “The 10 Most Important Things They Didn’t Teach You In High School” – should have earned him a chubby book contract.

Being less blatantly biased than the average hip, pop culture site, Cracked mops up the misinformation spilled by the Right and the Left — no, J. Edgar Hoover was NOT a transvestite, and the Tea Party isn’t the second coming of the Klan. Cracked’s “Magic Negro-gate: How Liberals Confused Obama with Kazaam” should have gained far more traction.

So I was deeply disappointed in late December, when Cracked published “5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam.”

Where to start?

Jacopo della Quercia’s exercise in apologetics singles out that famous phrase in the Treaty of Tripoli:

“The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Mussulmen [Moslems].”

But he neglects to mention why America needed a Treaty of Tripoli in the first place, i.e. ruthless, unprincipled Muslim pirates were the newborn United States’ first enemies, after the British. (Hence the line in the “Marine’s Hymn”…)

Quercia approvingly quotes Jefferson a lot, but leaves out something the President wrote with John Adams:

…that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

The rest of Quercia’s essay has more strawmen than Oz; no one thinks “ALL Muslim women wear veils,” for instance.

Thence begins the obligatory “Golden Age of Islam” nonsense (which is made to stretch tenuously over two segments, so the author can achieve a respectable grand total of “5 Ridiculous Things…”).

That “Golden Age” nonsense is no longer the debate-slayer it once was, and not only because anyone can find scholarly evidence of its non-existence in a matter of mere moments.

I write a lot about conservative talk radio, so (alas) I have to keep track of the Left’s hair-raising, borderline insane attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other hosts.

Here’s a round up of some of the biggest and craziest (unsuccessful) campaigns to destroy these powerful and popular pundits.

First up: the latest attempt to brand a talk radio host a “racist” fails miserably…

#5 “Monkey hear, monkey don’t”

Did you hear about the racist redneck talk radio host who referred to African-American students as “monkeys”?

The truth is: he didn’t.

Earlier this month, while criticizing his city’s dysfunctional public school system, WSPD’s Brian Wilson said:

“But certainly, teaching little monkeys to peel bananas and so on and them learning to do it correctly on cue does not mean that they’ve learned everything except a funny parlor trick.”

If you don’t see anything “racist” in those remarks, you’re not alone. The city’s public school system isn’t even overwhelmingly African-American; it’s 41% white and 8% Hispanic.

Nevertheless, the local newspaper, the Toledo Blade, easily convinced a gaggle of professional race-baiters to condemn Wilson’s imaginary bigotry. Then the trumped up “controversy” led to a public demonstration, with outraged protesters demanding an apology from the station.

Most predictably of all? When Wilson’s defenders pointed out that his 14-second clip had been purposely wrenched out of context, the Blade – which had run the “story” one four consecutive front pages — refused to admit they’d made a monkey out of a molehill.

Instead, the editors kept piling on, pointing out that, “Mr. Wilson doesn’t limit incendiary remarks to the airwaves. Atop his Web site is a picture of a microphone aflame.”

(Did I mention that the name of the crusading newspaper is… the Toledo Blade?)

Thanks to persistent pressure from the city’s alternative paper, the “story” is finally unraveling, but only after two weeks of daily character assassinations, and stubborn rumors of Wilson’s looming dismissal. (He still has his job.)

As the Toledo Free Press put it in their invaluable postmortem of the smear campaign:

“Toledo is not the hub of industry it once was, but if The Blade continues to manufacture stories like its recent Brian Wilson series, the Glass City’s production will rival Pittsburgh’s during the steel boom.”

Next: onto two big names — but only one big brain…

I’ve told you before about my mixed feelings regarding Trailers from Hell. As a fan of crappy cult films, I look forward to their weekly selection of old movie trailers, which feature commentaries by established directors and other industry insiders.

What I hate is the kneejerk leftism that permeates those commentaries. (For a particularly egregious example, see my reaction to John Landis’ remarks about The Purple Heart [Note: language warning.] Funny, you’d think Landis of all people would want to avoid the topics of “beheading” and “Asians”…)

Anyway, today they posted the trailer for the 1967 movie The President’s Analyst.

This mostly-forgotten curio is one of those “zany” 1960s “comedies” in which a bunch of B-listers run around screaming, hoping the audience will think it was hilarious.

If Get Smart had had pretensions to satirical social commentary, it would be The President’s Analyst.

Basically, the idea is that everybody in America is in therapy (which, if you’re a Hollywood liberal, must seem like the truth.) And if even the President had a shrink, spies and stuff would be trying to kidnap him to learn the President’s deepest secrets, right?

Oh, and America’s biggest enemy is… the phone company.

Again, I guess that’s how it seemed if you were a Hollywood liberal.

Look: I’m old enough to remember the old telephone monopoly. If you missed it, you’re lucky. It was terrible. Agreed.

So now you’re thinking, “Hey, so why not just deregulate the phone company and live in the wonderful world we have now, with competition, efficiency and innovation?”

No, stupid! That would make sense! Instead, let’s make a movie about how Ma Bell is worse than the Soviet Union, which killed tens of millions of people. (Alas, none of the the ones involved in this film…)

And then, when the phone company does get deregulated, let’s demonize the guy who does it:

Ronald Reagan.

That, boys and girls, was your “How to Think Like a Hollywood Liberal” lesson for today.

I doubt a movie like The President’s Analyst will make sense to anyone born after 1980. But the trailer is up at Trailers from Hell today, so that’s my excuse for writing about it.

Also: the commentary says Godfrey Cambridge’s “n-word” soliloquy is one of the greatest in film history. He’s wrong; that’s another thing a Hollywood liberal would think. But it’s timely, because it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so if you want to watch (and can handle historically accurate language), click here.

You’d never know it from this week’s “toxic commentary about toxic commentary,” but there was a time when progressives considered talk radio hosts brave martyrs for truth.

Back in 1984, an outspoken, belligerent Denver talk radio host on the brink of national stardom was shot to death by gunmen who had blatant political motives.

The incident inspired a Pulitzer Prize nominated play that was recently revived on Broadway to great acclaim, along with other plays, movies and TV plots.

Did I mention that that rude, obnoxious, opinionated, provocative — some might even say “toxic” — talk radio host was a self-described liberal? No? Sorry…

You see, when someone like radio talker Alan Berg gets killed by anti-semitic “Aryan Nations” freaks, progressives make sure you never hear the end of it, even decades later.

Bizarre, one-off incidents like Berg’s murder (or the “suspicious” death of Karen Silkwood, or the now-debunked heroism of Erin Brockovich) quickly become propaganda fodder in liberal hands. We’re meant to conclude that such freakish tragedies represent the tip of some sinister right wing iceberg always just about to sink the S.S. Amerikkka.

(Yes, I know it’s confusing: progressives can’t decide whether they’re trying to save their country or destroy it; bear with me…)

Alan Berg’s murder inspired Eric Bogisian’s critically acclaimed, award-winning 1987 play Talk Radio, which was later filmed by (surprise!) Oliver Stone. That play is performed regularly at “little theaters” across America, and was revived on Broadway in 2007–complete with predictable buzz that the work was “more relevant than ever.”

Berg’s murder also featured in the Deborah Winger “the militias are coming” vehicle Betrayal, and in Steven Dietz’s most frequently staged “the militias are still coming” play, God’s Country.

This week in the Denver Post, theater critic John Moore mused about Talk Radio in light of the horrific mass murder in Tuscon. Moore wrote:

There’s no shortage of similar on-air provocation today, from the left and right. And not only from hosts and callers but from elected officials themselves.

OK. The play/movie is entitled Talk Radio. So there’s that. But a thoughtful person immediately recognizes that, like so many fictional tropes beloved of leftleaning artists, those enshrined in Talk Radio don’t withstand real world scrutiny.

Berg was murdered in 1984. And while radio professionals will unhappily admit that their on air talent is prone to untimely deaths, these occur mostly as a result of ill-advised lifestyle choices, not conspiracies involving “white supremacists.” Thankfully, Berg’s “assassination” (as some insist on calling it) was an outlier.

Perhaps those who consider Talk Radio “prophetic” don’t know that it is conservative radio hosts like Glenn Beck whose lives are regularly threatened. Last year, the FBI advised Beck to start wearing a bullet proof vest, and he is that rare New Yorker licensed to carry a concealed firearm on his person for self defense. I’m pretty sure most of his death threats aren’t coming from Aryan Nations losers, either.

We also hear that talk radio hosts are bellicose hotheads, like Berg. Having grown up in the leftwing media milieu, imagine my surprise when I finally heard Rush Limbaugh’s mellow baritone for myself and didn’t detect a single scream. (Mark Levin and Michael Savage are closer to the stereotype; tellingly, they are also less popular than their lower key colleagues Rush, Hannity and Beck.)

We’re also reminded repeatedly that Rush and Beck are “getting rich” by “spreading lies” and being “divisive.” Indeed, Limbaugh brings home a staggering $50-million a year. And Beck bought gold at $400 — enough said. They are both wealthy men.

While I doubt the amount approaches $50-million, I’d still be interested to learn how much money Bogosian and Stone have made from Talk Radio — and how much of it went to Berg’s estate.

And let’s tease out the implications: if the hero of Talk Radio is a glorious martyr because he (loudly and rudely) exercised his First Amendment rights, doesn’t that mean that conservative “toxic” talkers are equally heroic?

The leftist calculus seems to be:

Rightwingers who kill are bad guys. Rightwingers who get people killed are bad guys. Rightwingers who get themselves killed are bad guys.

Let’s give those progressives credit: at least it’s an easy formula to remember!

When you watch the trailer for Talk Radio, you inadvertently get a glimpse of why liberal radio fails whenever it’s tried. The host’s jokes aren’t funny. He’s obviously a raw talent who lacks professionalism and discipline. And you get the distinct (and probably unintentional impression) that he’s not quite as smart as he thinks he is.

Lefty talk radio hosts don’t tend to get silenced by insane “right wingers” wielding guns. They’re more commonly pulled off the air through corporate incompetence, public indifference and sheer lack of talent.

But that’s not a very exciting plot for a movie.

Jane Fonda has a lot of nerve, no shame and, evidently, a mutated irony gene.

Or perhaps old age is finally catching up to the faded beauty, and her memory is failing…

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the actress/traitor/serial consort of powerful men immediately broadcast her thoughts on the tragedy via Twitter.

Her first tweet blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting (see screenshot here.)

Next, Fonda blasted “Glen Beck” (sic), saying he was “guilty too. Shame.” She accused both these outspoken conservatives of creating the “uncivil” atmosphere which supposedly drove a madman to kill.

Fonda’s rush-to-judgment reaction to the massacre was sadly typical of “progressives,” as we all know by now.

What makes it extra egregious is Fonda’s unique personal history.

As can be seen from her own Twitter avatar of choice, Jane Fonda (unlike Palin or Beck) has an arrest record, and is proud of it. (Fonda was detained for kicking a government official in 1970, but the charges were dropped.)

Worse, Jane Fonda’s words and actions repeatedly led directly to violence against her fellow Americans.

Photographs of Fonda pulling giddy, girlish, almost post-orgasmic faces in the company of enemy soldiers during a 1972 visit to North Vietnam are sickly familiar (see above). However, it’s important to review the details behind those famous pictures, to comprehend Fonda’s clear (unpunished) complicity in the torture of U.S. servicemen:

In July-August 1972 Fonda made her infamous trip to North Vietnam.  By this time, over 50,000 Americans had been killed in the war. While there, she posed for pictures on an anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes, and she volunteered to do a radio broadcast from Hanoi. She made approximately eight radio addresses, during which she told American pilots in the area:

“Use of  these bombs or condoning the use of these bombs makes one a war criminal … Examine the reasons given to justify the murder you are being paid to commit … I don’t know what your officers tell you … but [your] weapons are illegal and that’s not just rhetoric … The men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law, and in the past, in Germany and Japan,  men who committed these kinds of crimes were tried and executed.”

Fonda also quoted Ho Chi Minh during some of these broadcasts. She referred to President Richard Nixon as a “new-type Hitler,” and advised South Vietnamese soldiers to desert: “You are being used as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism.”

Fonda visited American prisoners of war and reported (falsely) that they had not been tortured. Consider the account of Michael Benge, a civilian advisor captured by the NLF in 1968 and held as a POW for five years, who writes:

“When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with her. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POWs were receiving, which was far different from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as ‘humane and lenient.’  Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees with outstretched arms with a piece of steel re-bar placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane every time my arms dipped.”

Tellingly, Jane Fonda is exquisitley oblivious to the ultimate irony:

That if Amerikkka really was the violent, vengeful nation she loathed enough to betray — through words and deeds that made her one of the most hated women in the country — Jane Fonda wouldn’t still be alive, and able to blame a horrific mass murder on two innocent citizens.

Since some people liked my earlier post called “8 Things I Wish I’d Known (or Remembered) When I Was a Leftist,” I’ve written a sequel of sorts, about the valuable lessons I did learn back then.

None of this is deep or profound (except maybe some stuff I quote from other people) but these insights have stood me in good stead during my time here on “the other side.”

#5: Cops have to give you their badge number

OK, so that makes me sound tougher than I was/am. Unlike a lot of my former friends, I never had the guts to get arrested for civil disobedience.

(Note: we were NOT those masked guys you see smashing up the Starbucks at G20s. Violence was a no-no, even when it was swirling around us, like during the riot that capped off the 1988 Unconvention.)

However, I picked up some practical information about lawyers, jail and similar miscellany, not all of which was unsavory. Siding with Poland’s Solidarity made us the enemies of every “progressive” (read: pro-Soviet) group in town; it also taught me how a movement goes from grassroots to government, while striving to stay true to transcendent principles. (Tea Partiers, take notes.)

Look: while I don’t share Abbie Hoffman’s motives,  Steal This Book nevertheless includes sound tips on, for example, choosing shotguns for home defense. The laws of ballistics, and of the universe in general, are operative whatever your political leanings.

Facts are facts, even if they’re being spouted by a hippie. The key (and frequently forgotten) word is “facts.” Take what’s true and useful from every source.

(And I have had occasion to demand a badge number recently, come to think of it…)

Phyllis Chesler writes here at NewsReal Blog:

On February 24, 2011, the distinguished Lars Hedegaard, the President of the Danish Free Press Society and the International Free Press Society, [and Jesper Langballe, a member of the Danish Parliament] will stand trial for telling the truth about Islamic gender apartheid. (…)

Please note: Islamists did not launch their legal prosecution. Their own countrymen, in the language of “political correctness” and in the guise of opposing “hate speech” did so. (…)

According to Mohamud and Winkel Holm, both MP Langballe and Lars Hedegaard have long ago “emphasised that they did not intend to accuse all Muslims or even the majority of Muslims of such crimes.

This has made no impression on the public prosecutor.”

So why do we insist upon using that unwieldy formula, “not all Muslims…”?

Everyone who goes to the trouble of uttering the painfully obvious and obligatory “not all Muslims” line gets persecuted and prosecuted anyway — in Mark Steyn’s case, for the very article in which he used the words, “not all Muslims;” in fact, the Muslims who took him to court specifically objected to Steyn’s “sarcastic tone” while employing it. You see, he was being insufficiently respectful when excusing them from their own crime-in-progress.

As you can see from that last tortured sentence, writing about the battle against stealth jihad is difficult enough without handicapping ourselves, a la “Harrison Bergeron”, to appease unappeasable enemies.

And this goes to the media/Democrat reaction to the Giffords:

An army wouldn’t (well, until recently) let its enemy tell it what kind of ammo it could use.

Why are we allowing our enemies to do so now, when the ammo is language?

As one emailer wrote me yesterday, by trying to tell us how to speak, “The Left is putting down a slave rebellion by shaming the slaves.”

Remember: back in the day, we didn’t declare war on “some Germans.”

From now on, just start saying “Islam” and refuse to employ the other twisted locution.

Once you accept your enemies’ premises, even if they are technically correct, you’re already losing.