Standing Up Against Wealth-Shaming

By Michelle Malkin

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

America, we have a bullying epidemic. No, not the school bullying issues that get constant attention from Hollywood, the White House and the media. No, not the "fat-shaming" and "body-shaming" outbreaks on Facebook. The problem is wealth-shaming. Class-shaming. Success-shaming.

The State of the Job Creator is under siege.

Last week, a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His passionate letter to The Wall Street Journal decried the "progressive war on the American 1 percent." He called on the left to stop demonizing "the rich," and he condemned the Occupy movement's "rising tide of hatred."

The mini-manifesto was newsworthy because this truth-teller is not a GOP politician or conservative activist or Fox News personality. As he points out, he lives in the "epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco." No matter. The mob is shooting the messenger anyway. But maybe, just maybe, his critical message in defense of our nation's achievers will transcend, inspire, embolden and prevail.

The letter-writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a Harvard MBA. He started out at the bottom at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company on the side and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation's oldest and most important venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

A hands-on dynamo, Perkins immersed himself in the science and technology of the companies in his portfolio. He even accompanied them on sales calls. He poured his heart and soul into the business of business. Perkins achieved great wealth for himself, his partners and his clients -- and the world is a better place for it. Kleiner Perkins' groundbreaking investment in Genentech planted the seeds of the biotech revolution. An MIT profile notes that in its first three decades, the firm "made more than 475 investments, generating $90 billion in revenue and creating 275,000 jobs" and "funded 167 companies that later went public, including Amazon, AOL, Genentech, Google and Netscape."

Because he dared to compare the seething resentment of modern progressives to Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany, the grievance industry attacked Perkins and dismissed his message. His former colleagues at the venture capital firm he founded threw him under the bus. Left-wing punk journalists immediately branded him "nuts" and a "rich idiot."

Please note: Not one of those sanctimonious grievance-mongers had anything to say about the Molotov cocktail-fueled riots and fires set by the Occupy mobs at banks, car dealerships and restaurants in Oakland that provoked Perkins' comparison in the first place.

While he regrets invoking Kristallnacht specifically, Perkins unequivocally refused to back down from his message defending the "creative 1 percent." He reiterated his fundamental point in a TV interview on Monday: "Anytime the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it's wrong. And dangerous. And no good ever comes from it."

Perkins also chastised those who bemoan "income inequality," including his erstwhile "friends" Al Gore, Jerry Brown and Barack Obama: "The 1 percent are not causing the inequality. They are the job creators. ... I think Kleiner Perkins itself over the years has created pretty close to a million jobs, and we're still doing it. It's absurd to demonize the rich for being rich and for doing what the rich do, which is get richer by creating opportunity for others."

Amen, amen and amen. Perkins barely scratched the surface of the War on Wealth that has spread under the Obama regime. Anti-capitalism saboteurs have organized wealth-shaming protests at corporate CEOs' private homes in New York and in private neighborhoods in Connecticut. Hypocrite wealth-basher and former paid Enron adviser Paul Krugman at The New York Times whipped up hatred against the "plutocrats" in solidarity with the Occupy mob. New York state lawmakers received threatening mail saying it was "time to kill the wealthy" if they didn't renew the state's tax surcharge on millionaires.

"If you don't, I'm going to pay a visit with my carbine to one of those tech companies you are so proud of and shoot every spoiled Ivy League (expletive) I can find," the death threat read. In Perkins' own backyard, Bay Area celebrity rapper Boots Riley infamously penned "5 Million Ways To Kill a CEO" ("Toss a dollar in the river, and when he jump in/If you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again.") before making cameo appearances at vandal-infested Occupy Oakland marches over the past few years.

But the most dangerous threats to the nation's job creators don't come from Oakland rappers or social justice guerillas or San Francisco neighbors griping about tech workers' private buses and big homes. The deadliest threats come from the men in power in Washington who stoke bottomless hatred against "millionaires and billionaires" through class-bashing rhetoric and entrepreneur-crushing policies -- while they pocket the hard-earned money of the achievers trying to buy immunity. It's high time to shame the wealth-shamers and their cowed enablers. Silence is complicity.

Ben Affleck: 'Big Republican' Actors Are Hard to Watch

By Larry Elder

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Democratic fundraiser/actor Ben Affleck -- and the next big-screen "Batman" -- recently gave an interview to Playboy. His own bias against Republicans, he admits, prevents him from fully enjoying a Republican actor's performance. "It's ... hard," said Affleck, "to get people to suspend disbelief."

Affleck said: "When I watch a guy I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks, I probably wouldn't like this person if I met him, or we would have different opinions. That (bleep) fogs the mind when you should be paying attention and be swept into the illusion."

Fair enough. But how do you think conservatives feel?

Nearly every actor who cuts loose about politics, let alone campaigns for or donates to causes or politicians, almost always supports Democrats and liberal causes. Nothing wrong with this. But it's not even close to a fair fight. Of America's stars -- old, young and in-between -- the many who speak out are invariably Democrats.

A Clint Eastwood is more than offset by the many performers like Cher, who said: "If you're black in this country, if you're a woman in this country, if you are any minority in this country at all, what could possibly possess you to vote Republican? ... You won't have one f---ing right left." Or like Julia Roberts, who said, "Republican comes in the dictionary just after 'reptile' and just above 'repugnant.'" Or Ed Asner, from Disney's film "Up," who contributed his name and voice to a cartoon political ad showing a dastardly rich man literally urinating on the poor.

Sean Penn drips with contempt toward the awful guys on the other side.

Tea partiers, including Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., says Penn, have a "mental health problem" which "would be solved by committing them" to a psychiatric facility with an "executive order" from the president.

Why such a microscopic number of outspoken conservatives? Fear. Cuban-born actress Maria Conchita Alonso, for example, is a recent cautionary tale. Cast to star in the Latino version of the Vagina Monologues, Alonso cut an ad for a California tea party "secure the borders" candidate. Big mistake. The play's theatre, located in the heavily Hispanic Mission District of San Francisco, received threats to disrupt the performance -- if Alonso remained in the cast.

When Alonso "quit," the play's producer shrugged: "We really can't have her in the show, unfortunately. Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we're in the middle of the Mission. Doing what she is doing is against what we believe." Against what we believe?! How far is this from "Are you now, or have you ever been ... ?"

How do you think conservatives feel?

Affleck and his buddy, fellow A-lister Matt Damon, held fundraisers for the successful senate races of New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and for the election and re-election of President Barack Obama. Democrats all, or people who -- to conservatives -- are "against what we believe."

Of Hollywood's political contributions in the last two presidential election cycles, 86 percent went to Democrats in 2008, and 79 percent in 2012. More than 90 percent of contributions by celebrities to the 2012 presidential race went to Obama over Republican opponent Mitt Romney. The Wall Street Journal said, "(DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey) Katzenberg wrote a $2 million check to jump-start Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting the president. His fundraising work has yielded as much as $7 million over the past five years."

Miramax's Harvey Weinstein is another Democratic Hollywood power player and fundraiser. He, too, shows no reluctance to show his contempt toward the very people Weinstein counts on to pay to see his movies. His take on the congressional Republicans who opposed Obama during the government shutdown? "Some of them are, you know," said Weinstein, "unfortunately (racist)."

For his book "Primetime Hollywood," conservative talk show host Ben Shapiro interviewed several major Hollywood primetime television producers -- the people who make the fare we see. One after another, they saluted -- even cheered -- their hostility toward conservatives. Some bragged about injecting liberal messages in programming, while admitting they refuse to knowingly hire a conservative. One, Susan Harris, who created "Golden Girls," called conservatives "idiots" with "medieval minds."

MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell, formerly a "West Wing" writer, explained why the show lacked sympathetic Republican characters: "You'll never, ever, get the Republican TV show. The Writers Guild of America, my union, is, at a minimum, 99 percent leftist liberal. ... And we don't know how to write it. We don't."

Got that? Affleck can't stomach watching a Republican. "West Wing's" O'Donnell can't stomach writing about one. But Hollywood expects the audience to stomach them .

Do bigmouth lefty actors think their skills override the audience's politics, that conservatives can "suspend disbelief" -- even as Affleck admits he can't when the actor is a "Big Republican"?

If audiences gave leftwing actors, producers and studios the Maria Conchita Alonso treatment, half the country would never set foot in a theatre. Hollywood, after all, oozes with "Big Democrats" whose politics, for much of the country, go "against what we believe."

Politics Double Standard

By Emmett Tyrrell

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Events of this past week have lent credence to one of my most dearly held beliefs. A double standard in political life is better than no standard at all. The Democrats have -- as to their behavior in politics -- almost no standards at all. The stuffy Republicans have -- as to their behavior in politics -- a pretty hard and fast set of standards and they stick by them.

When the Hon. Trey Radel, a freshman congressman from southwest Florida, was arrested last October for trying to purchase cocaine from an undercover police officer at Washington's DuPont Circle, I figured his goose was cooked. Surely the Democrats would be against him. After all, he is a Republican. A more serious problem was his fellow Republicans. They would not stand by him. They almost never do stand by a Republican caught in flagrante delicto. Remember if you will the late Richard Milhous Nixon. Contrast his dark fate with the Democrats' national treasure, Bill Clinton, who committed perjury and obstructed justice. House Republicans found him guilty as charged, but in the Senate both Democrats and Republicans let him off easy, and he has been having a jolly time of it for years while Nixon's reputation has only darkened.

Congressman Radel pleaded guilty to what the philosopher, W.C. Fields, called his alcohol problem. Fields could never get enough of the stuff, and, apparently, neither can Congressman Radel. So he tried cocaine. Problematically, cocaine possession in most precincts of America is still illegal. Possibly out West there is some enlightened spot where it is legal, say, for treating halitosis or a head cold, but not in the District of Columbia. Out in the health-conscious West you cannot smoke cigarettes, but in various places you can smoke marijuana and even cook it in with brownies or, who knows, pasta. Yet tobacco is malum prohibitum, and now even in New York and Massachusetts the solons are thinking about legalizing marijuana. Congressman Radel should have run for office in Colorado or the state of Washington.

Instead he comes from Florida and a particularly conservative district embracing straight-laced Naples and Ft. Meyers. Upon his arrest, he immediately went into rehab and for all I know read the philosophers such as Fields. But his goose was cooked. Acting according to their standards, his Republican constituents within months began looking for a new congressman. By Monday, he had gotten the word. Republican leaders, who had been urging him to resign, were lining up behind his would-be successors. Possibly he will go back to talk radio, possibly as a Democrat.

The doubled standard in politics has been around for decades. It was most spectacularly on display in 1983 in the congressional sex scandal of two congressmen, a Democrat and a Republican. The Democrat, the Hon. Gerry Studds, was caught with a minor, a congressional page who happened to be a male. The Republican, the Hon. Dan Crane, was caught with a minor, a congressional page who happened to be a young lady. The House of Representatives voted to censure them, though it is said that they were censured so as to head off a move by Republicans to expel the errant legislators. Congressman Crane was so discredited among his Republican constituents that he went down to defeat when he was up for re-election in 1984 and has never been heard from again. Congressman Studds, claiming to have acted as a hero in trying to protect the identity of the intern, went on to win re-election after re-election until his retirement in 1997. He passed on in 2006, possibly to sainthood.

As I say, a double standard is better than no standard at all. The Democrats who are untroubled by their own moral anarchy would have no sense of right or wrong if it was not for the Republicans. The Republicans may get booted from high office for their offenses, but these Republicans serve a purpose. They give us all a sense of right and wrong. Good show, GOP.

The Poison of Postmodern Lying

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, January 30, 2014

All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies anymore -- a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire culture.

Postmodernism (the cultural fad "after modernism") went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like "truth" were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege. Unfortunately, bad ideas like that have a habit of poisoning an entire society -- and now they have.

Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis was recently caught fabricating her own autobiography. She exaggerated her earlier ordeals, lied about the age at which she divorced and was untruthful about how she paid for her Harvard Law School education.

When caught, Davis did not apologize for lying. Instead, she lamely offered that, "My language should be tighter." Apparently, only old fogies still believe in truth and falsehood -- period. In contrast, Davis knows that promoting a progressive feminist agenda is "truth," and she only needs to be "tighter" about her fabrications to neutralize her reactionary critics.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren for years falsely claimed that she was a Native American. That fabricated ancestry proved useful in upping her career trajectory. When pressed about her racial background during her 2012 campaign, the Harvard law professor denied any deliberate misrepresentation and went on to be elected. Such progressive crusaders assume that they serve the greater truth of social change.

In the gospel of postmodern relativism, what did it matter if the president of the United States promised that Obamacare would not alter existing health-care plans when it was clear that it would? Instead, the good intentions of universal health care are the only truth that matters.

For that matter, the "law" that requires a president to enforce legislation passed by the Congress is likewise a construct. If ignoring bothersome laws -- whether the individual mandate and timetable of Obamacare, or federal immigration law -- serves a greater social justice, then such dereliction also becomes "truth." Blindly enforcing legalistic details of the law that are deemed no longer in the interest of the people would be the real lie, or so the reasoning goes.

Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don't become lies -- the facts are irrelevant. When Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2007 heard the factual details of the successful Iraq surge as related by Gen. David Petraeus, she said it required a "suspension of disbelief." In her postmodern sensibility, fighting an unpopular war was a lie, but opposing it was the truth -- and the actual metrics for whether the surge was working or not were simply an irrelevant narrative.

Later, as secretary of state, Clinton dismissed the circumstances surrounding the murders in Benghazi with the callous exclamation, "What difference does it make?" She had a postmodern point. If President Obama, then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and Clinton herself all wrongly and deliberately assured the nation that a politically incorrect video had triggered the attacks in Benghazi, were they not on the right side of opposing religious bias and helping a progressive president to be re-elected? How could that good intention be a lie?

If Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to the Congress that the National Security Agency does not snoop on American citizens, how can that be perjury if Clapper's goal was to silence Obama's right-wing critics? For that matter, if Clapper wanted to show tolerance for Islamists, how could it be a lie when he testified earlier that the radical Muslim Brotherhood was "largely secular"?

By what arbitrary rules can one claim that "Piss Christ" or other provocative anti-Christian art is blasphemous or inferior, if its apparent purpose is to lessen the influence of a purportedly pernicious religion? Was Obama's autobiography truth or fiction, or something in between -- as hinted by the president himself when he was caught in untruths and then backed away from some of his stories, claiming they were now just "composites"?

Part of old America still abides by absolute truth and falsity. A door is either hung plumb or not. The calibrations of the Atlas rocket either are accurate and it takes off, or inaccurate and it blows up. Noble intentions cannot make prime numbers like 5 or 7 divisible.

But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become "it depends." Admissions, hiring, evaluations, autobiographies, and the statements of politicians and government officials, all become truthful if they serve the correct cause -- and damn any reactionary discrepancies.

To paraphrase George Orwell, everything is relative, but some things are more relative than others.

Hollywood, Propaganda and Liberal Politics

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The legendary media tycoon William Randolph Hearst believed America needed a strongman and that Franklin D. Roosevelt would fit the bill. He ordered his newspapers to support FDR and the New Deal. At his direction, Hearst's political allies rallied around Roosevelt at the Democratic convention, which some believe sealed the deal for Roosevelt's nomination.

But all that wasn't enough. Hearst also believed the voters had to be made to see what could be gained from a president with a free hand. So he financed the film "Gabriel Over the White House," starring Walter Huston. The film depicts an FDR look-alike president who, after a coma-inducing car accident, is transformed from a passive Warren Harding type into a hands-on dictator. The reborn commander in chief suspends the Constitution, violently wipes out corruption and revives the economy through a national socialist agenda. When Congress tries to impeach him, he dissolves Congress.

The Library of Congress summarizes the film nicely. "The good news: He reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress and brings about world peace. The bad news: He's Mussolini."

Hearst wanted to make sure the script got it right, so he sent it to what today might be called a script doctor, namely Roosevelt. FDR loved it, but he did have some changes, which Hearst eagerly accepted. A month into his first term, FDR sent Hearst a thank-you note. "I want to send you this line to tell you how pleased I am with the changes you made in 'Gabriel Over the White House,'" Roosevelt wrote. "I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help."

I bring up this tale to note that Hollywood has never been opposed to propaganda. When Hollywood's self-declared auteurs and artistes denounce propaganda as the enemy of art, almost invariably what they really mean is "propaganda we don't like."

Consider the film "Lone Survivor," which tells the true story of heroic Navy SEALs in Afghanistan. The film has been denounced by some critics; a "jingoistic, pornographic work of war propaganda," in the words of one reviewer. Richard Corliss of Time chimed in: "That these events actually happened doesn't necessarily make it plausible or powerful in a movie, or keep it from seeming like convenient propaganda." Similar complaints (from non-conservatives, at least) about antiwar films made during the George W. Bush years are much harder to find.

Similarly, if Demi Moore proclaimed, "I pledge to be a servant to our president," at the dawn of the Bush presidency, it would have created a career-ending firestorm.

When it was owned by GE -- a company with billions of dollars invested in subsidy-dependent alternative energy technologies -- NBC began its "Green Week," seven days of sitcoms, sports shows and even news programs doing their part for the cause. There was nary a word of protest from TV critics or supposedly independent writers and producers about the corruption of art. I wonder, if Fox announced a "pro-life week," whether the same crowd would yawn as conspicuously.

In the book, "Primetime Propaganda," author Ben Shapiro quotes many TV producers boasting about blacklisting conservative actors and shilling for liberal issues. As Shapiro notes, perhaps no figure was more upfront -- or successful -- at yoking art to political proselytizing than Norman Lear, the creator of "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons" and other shows.

Which is fitting. Last fall, the California Endowment, which is spending millions to promote the Affordable Care Act, gave $500,000 to the Norman Lear Center at USC to work on ways to get Hollywood to do its part. In February, the center will cosponsor with the Writer's Guild of America an event in New York titled "The Affordable Care Act: Comedy, Drama & Reality," about portraying Obamacare in TV and film. The Obama administration, naturally, will be sending an emissary to help.

It's doubtful this will have any significant effect. The rollout has made its impression, and the changes wrought by Obamacare in the individual lives of millions of Americans won't be erased by a very special episode of "The Big Bang Theory." But it's a useful reminder that Hollywood is always eager to lend its services -- for the right president.