Wrap-up of news and opinion from your not-so-humble correspondent.

The Politically Correct Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is turning into quite the liberal.

On June 8th and 9th, 2009, David Letterman told a few jokes on his late-night CBS show that his writers didn’t set up properly. Letterman was trying to joke about Sarah Palin’s pregnant-out-of-wedlock daughter, Bristol.

You don’t need to convince me that David Letterman’s jokes are caustic and just nasty. They are, and the meaner Dave gets the harder Letterman’s audience laughs, with bandleader Paul Shaffer as the Voice of the Angels scolding his boss when Letterman skirts the edge of what passes for good taste these days.

But if you’re going to run for high office on conservative family values — as Sarah Palin did — having your unmarried daughter knocked up by a boyfriend who manages to escape the shotgun wedding is an obvious politically liability. It’s not traditional. It’s not sanctified. It’s not done.

Publicly embracing your pregnant-out-of-wedlock daughter on the campaign trail squashes the guideline that children of politicians are off-limits, opening the subject up to journalists and comedians alike.

Letterman jumped into the loophole when the Alaskan governor and one of her daughters showed up in Dave’s own stomping grounds — New York City.

Letterman’s first opening monologue joke on June 8, 2009, was that when Sarah Palin and her daughter attended a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” Rodriquez was the Yankee’s third baseman notorious for liaisons with strippers and call girls.

Letterman told a variation the next night when he quipped, “The toughest part of her visit was keeping Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.”

Eliot Spitzer was the married New York governor who’d resigned three months earlier when it was exposed that he’d been visiting high-priced call girls.

Okay. As nasty jokes go, this one was pretty fair and balanced, since it linked scandals of the Republican Sarah Palin with the Democrat Eliot Spitzer.

But, as I said, Letterman’s writers didn’t do their due diligence, because Sarah was at the baseball game not with 18-year-old Bristol but with her 14-year-old daughter, Willow.

So Letterman’s writers opened up a loophole for Sarah Palin to fire back, and fire back she did: “Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”

Now. Sarah Palin’s staff also failed in their due diligence, because neither Alex Rodriguez nor Eliot Spitzer were rapists, but clients of call-girls. So, if anything, David Letterman wasn’t calling Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old a potential rape victim. He was calling her a whore.

Here’s what “the rest of the world knows.”

Letterman’s jokes were intended to make fun of 18-year-old pregnant-out-of-wedlock Bristol, not 14-year-old Willow.

If Sarah Palin really didn’t know that, and wasn’t just deliberately acting clueless about the obvious intent of Letterman’s joke, she’s just — well — retarded.

Which brings us to the latest example of Sarah Palin’s use of political correctness to silence those she regards as political adversaries.

Back in August, 2009, in a private weekly strategy session, White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, needed a colorful phrase to describe what he regarded as the realpolitik cluelessness of left-wing Democrats who planned to run TV ads against fellow Congressional Democrats who wouldn’t support the President’s proposal for a “public option” in health care, even if splitting the party meant that no bill at all would make it to the President’s desk.

Rahm chose the term of art to describe the clueless: “fucking retarded.”

No one reported this until the Wall Street Journal did in a story run January 26th.

Sarah Palin’s two-year-old son, Trig, is a Down Syndrome child — what Devo’s first single in 1977 called “Mongoloid.”

Down Syndrome children are supposed to be learning impaired, though that’s not always true. But the term “retarded” is no longer used by the medical or teaching professions, and the common schoolyard epithet when I was growing up — “retard” — is now politically incorrect.

So is “mongoloid.” So is “moron.” So is “idiot.” So is “stupid.”

In fact, the only allowable term for persons of reduced intelligence these days is “Republican.”

But Sarah Palin — somehow missing that Rahm Emmanuel’s comment was directed at Democrats — decided that his use of the term “retarded” was an insult to her baby, and has now called for Rahm Emmanuel to be fired for using the word.

Sarah Palin takes Umbridge — er, umbrage — at use of the word “retarded.”

For using a word she doesn’t like. Palin wants the word “retarded” to be regarded as equivalent to the “N” word — and use of the “N” word can aggravate the circumstances of an act to make it into a “hate crime.” If Sarah Palin gets her way, calling someone “retarded” could be a felony.

Well, what term of art should I now use for a so-called conservative who repeatedly engages in fits of political-correctness designed to shut up people she doesn’t like?

While We’re At It, Let’s Talk About Free Speech, Egalitarianism, and Common Sense

Let’s cut the crap.

There is diversity in human beings.

I’m fat and deconditioned. I’m not going to win any Olympic medals for the United States.

Down Syndrome children are often enough as mentally limited as I am physically limited. Sarah Palin’s son, Trig — and honestly it’s too early to know — just might not be smart enough to run for President of the United States.

But then again, Trig’s mother is no mental giant, and she might, so who knows?

The President Gets Some Right

During his State of the Union address, President Obama offered several proposals that made my ears perk up. He proposed freezing government spending. He promised that all American troops would be out of Iraq by August 2010. He called for eliminating capital-gains taxes on small business investment. He called for building new nuclear power plants. He even said nice things about “clean coal” technologies.

Then, on February 1st, the Obama administration did something I’ve been waiting for a president to do since 1969: announce that the future of the United States exploration of space did not lie with NASA, but with private industry. Obama is sending NASA back to its original mission of research, and saying future space flights need to be accomplished by private firms.

If President Obama accomplishes nothing else during his administration, his “deprogramming space flight” may well be as important to the future of the human race as President Kennedy’s launching a program to land an American on the moon by the end of the 1960’s.

Initial Disclosures

The Director of National Intelligence: DNI. Deny. But is it plausible deniability?

California. CA. See-ya!

Nevada. NV. Envy? You know it!

Hawaii. HI. That’s got to be good for tourism!

Beware this Ides of January wrap-up of news and opinion from your not-so-humble correspondent.

The Devil Went Down to Haiti

According to the Southern Baptist charismatic Pat Robertson speaking on his show The 700 Club, the recent 7.0 earthquake in Haiti which is estimated to have killed 100,000 — including Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince, and devastated a third of the country’s nine million inhabitants — was engineered by none other than Satan, collecting on an old debt from when the Haitians made a deal to liberate themselves from the French.

Leaving aside the question of how Pat Robertson has such close relations with Satan that he’s privy to the Alienated Angel’s account ledgers, this correspondent has to sympathize with anyone who feels that trading a Gallic overlord for Satan is a step up; and I also have to wonder — now that Al Gore’s Belle Meade, Tennessee house has frozen over — whether all those things that would never come to pass until Hell freezes over are now in our future?

Jay v. Conan

There’s a very funny moment in the 2007 movie Music and Lyrics where Brad Garrett — playing music manager Chris Riley — tells his client Hugh Grant, as 80’s “Pop” star Alex Fletcher, that his gig as a retro performer is drying up because “There are new old acts coming up all the time.”

To my 18-year-old daughter retro is her parents’ generation; to me, retro is my parents’ generation. That means my cultural memory — without much study of history — easily reaches back to the “golden age of radio” when Fred Allen and Jack Benny feuded with each other for a decade on their respective radio shows, and even in movies.

It was an act, of course. Jack Benny and Fred Allen were good friends in real life and their writing staffs collaborated on writing the insults, long before Don Rickles, Redd Foxx, and Friars’ Club Roasts made a genre out of insult comedy for generations of comics to follow. But the Benny-Allen crossfire caught on with the public and the feud was good for the ratings of both shows.

As of this writing, TMZ is reporting that Conan O’Brien’s last day as host of The Tonight Show will be a week from tonight, Friday January 22nd — just shy of eight months after his taking over hosting of the show on June 1, 2009.

Also as of this writing NBC executives are denying the TMZ story to The Hollywood Reporter.

But NBC executives — who broke promises both to Jay Leno regarding their one-year commitment to his prime-time show, and who are apparently in breach of contract to Conan O’Brien, who moved his old Late Night cast and much of his crew from New York City to Burbank to take over The Tonight Show — do not have a lot of credibility these days.

Still, the NBC website has been promoting all the quips Leno and O’Brien have been firing against each other so heavily that I can only conclude that — like the old Benny-Allen feud — NBC is using this bonanza of free publicity to boost what have been sagging late-night ratings for a network in the toilet during prime-time as well.

If NBC is really dumping Conan to give Leno back the Tonight Show gig they forced him out of five years before his May 29, 2009 last show when he passed the baton to Conan, they’re not only short-sighted idiots but also utter incompetents.

Alienating Conan’s fan base by dumping him could well poison-pill NBC’s entire late night ratings … perhaps for good.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Jay. I thought he grew into The Tonight Show as a masterful host exceeded only by the sheer genius of Johnny Carson, and I’ve also been a devotee of his prime-time show.

But I also watch Conan, who’s just as much a major talent as Jay with his schooling at Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Late Night, and eight months of hosting Tonight.

And they both have killer bands.

When this finally shakes out if NBC loses either show, Comcast — the new owners of NBC — need a clean sweep of NBC programming management.

How hard, after all, would it be for NBC to schedule 26 weeks a year of an 11:35 PM (10:35 PM Central) Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and 26 weeks a year of an 11:35 PM (10:35 PM Central) Jay Leno Show?

Or even split the weeks — three nights Jay and two nights Conan one week, alternating with three nights Conan and two nights Jay the next.

I remember that it was Johnny Carson taking so many nights off from The Tonight Show that enabled Jay Leno to make his bones as the show’s regular guest host. Without Johnny’s days off Leno never would have beaten out then Late Night host David Letterman for the Tonight Show gig in the first place.

If you haven’t seen it, give a look to the tremendously entertaining 1996 movie The Late Shift, about the battle between Leno and Letterman to replace Johnny as host of The Tonight Show.

Jay said he never wanted to go through that again when he first agreed to let Conan succeed him as host of The Tonight Show.

Yet here we are.

Jay told us that he’s been saving his TV salaries for decades anyway, living only off his stage gigs. It’s not like he can’t afford to be magnanimous.

It won’t cost NBC any more than they’ll have to spend to pay off Conan for breach of contract after Conan’s management and legal pit bulls get done with them — and there are two standing sets and two working casts and crews ready to perform.

Jay and Conan are old friends. They should get into one of Jay’s classic cars and drive through the In-N-Out Burger take-out window, then present this plan to NBC.

I’d think better of both of them if they did, because it would prove to me they’re savvy enough to have revived the old Benny-Allen bit.

But if NBC truly can only have one and only one 11:35 star, then it’s time to settle this the American way.

No, not pistols at dawn.

I propose a series of Comedy Debates between Jay and Conan.

Four or five of them should do.

Let the League of Women Voters run it … or the Friar’s Club.

Tom Brokaw should moderate.

The American people can vote for the NBC late-night host just like they vote for American Idol contestants.

Now that would put NBC back at the top of the ratings, much more than the Winter Olympics will.

White House Party Crashers

My email correspondent writes me, “Tareq and Michaele Salahi snapped the pic above with Obama at a ‘Rock The Vote’ event on June 9, 2005.”

The point of this photo made by my right-wing emailer — and all the right-wing blogs that are carrying this photo — is that supposedly the Salahi’s had a prior relationship with Barack Obama and were actually invited to the dinner — thus the Secret Service made no mistake in letting them in — but somehow the White House is trying to smear the Secret Service (who hold the President’s life in their hands every day) for letting them in.

How’s that again?

All the photo proves to me is that the Salahi’s began stalking Obama long before he ran for president.

Pharmaceutical Madness

If you’re upbeat and busy all the time, you’re hyperactive — and there’s a prescription pharmaceutical for that.

If you’re melancholy or grieving, there’s a prescription pharmaceutical for that.

And if you are sometimes upbeat and sometimes melancholy, you’re bipolar — there’s a prescription drug for that.

Heads they win, tails you lose.

No matter what your mood is, you’re sick and need their drugs.

What a racket!

The “Sheik of Araby” on Science Fiction

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudia Arabia — interviewed Thursday by Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business Network — responded to Neil’s comment that Avatar portrayed businessmen in a negative light, “It’s science fiction. Who cares? … It’s going to make over two billion dollars for News Corp.”

Prince Alwaleed told Neil Cavuto that he owns 5.7% of News Corp. as a permanent strategic investment in support of the Murdoch family.

The Prince also told Cavuto that Avatar is the only science-fiction movie he’s ever seen.

First off, kudos to Neil Cavuto for being the only Fox commentator with the guts even to note that Fox’s blockbuster movie would have been ideologically trashed by almost every pundit on both the Fox News Network and the Fox Business Network if the movie had been released by any studio other than Fox.

Double kudos to Neil for having the balls to bring the subject up in a conversation with an investor holding an “irrevocable” 5.7% strategic investment commitment to his employer’s company.

Triple kudos to Cavuto for giving a writer/producer like me the heads up that — assuming I could ever get the gig — I can make any point I want to in a Fox movie, just so long as it’s science-fiction, and makes its investors a bundle.

That leaves every project I currently have in development — or have in my archives — open for submission to Fox.

That would include Alongside Night.

That would include Lady Magdalene’s.

Yes, the trivialization of much of my life’s work is insulting.

But the tolerance granted a court jester also has its advantages.

My worries were unnecessary. I’ve done it. But I’ve cheated.

I’ve serialized the introduction and first ten chapters of my book-in-progress, Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto, to fill up eleven of those columns; and I’ve taken several pieces I first wrote for my Facebook friends and updated them for publication here.

I’ve also uploaded into this column’s “strategic reserve” another Facebook piece, four previously published “Classic J. Neil” articles, and the forematter and first two chapters of my unpublished book manuscript, I Met God. So if I find myself unable to write a new column for any reason — travel, illness, or other pressing duties — I can maintain the daily continuity. Among print newspaper columnists this is called putting columns “on the spike.”

If I’ve found anything, since I started writing this column, it’s that on any given day there’s far more variety in what I can write about than I can cover if I stick to a rule of one topic for each day.

So, every once in a while, I’m going to do a “catch up” news commentary which I’ll be titling The Nobeus News Report. If you say “Nobeus News” aloud you’ll get the joke.

Here we go.

Al Gore and the Gangrene Movement

The East Anglia emails which show that not only has there been no global warming but that the earth has been experiencing global cooling, have barely had any impact on Oscar-winner and Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore’s continued campaign to cripple the American economy by forcing Americans to forgo cheap and domestically plentiful fossil-fuel energy in favor of solar, wind, and geothermal sources of energy that are not yet on the market.

I’m all in favor of going green, if by green you mean adding additional sources of clean energy onto the menu. I’d be off-grid in a heartbeat with my own solar and wind power if it was something I could pick up at Walmart, set out in my yard, and plug in to my house. That’s the sort of green energy that my friend Kent Hastings’ blog Permakent is all about.

But Al Gore’s carbon-jackboot on my neck isn’t Green. It’s Gangrene. It’s high time we made the distinction.

Last week David Letterman spent a half hour asking Gore leading questions about global warming and overpopulation so fawning that even Al Gore seemed embarrassed. And, of course, not a single mention of the Anglia scandal.

It reminded me of the scene in the 1967 sex comedy A Guide for the Married Man, in which Robert Morse’s philandering husband character advises a wannabe philanderer played by Walter Matthau to “Deny, deny, deny!” We’re given a comedy sketch of a husband caught by his wife in bed with another woman, who simply pretends it never happened. He answers all her accusations saying “What?” while he and his mistress dress and make the bed, and by the time the mistress is out the door and he’s seated in his chair asking his wife “What’s for dinner?” the wife doubts her own sanity and starts cooking.

Of course outright lying is not excluded from the Gore repertoire. Today he claimed that the Anglia emails are all ten years old and therefore irrelevant to the Copenhagen Conference. Bull shit. The most recent of the whistleblower-released emails is only weeks old.

I wonder how long it will take the Boston Globe’s Ellen Goodman to write that Al Gore’s denials of the Climate Fraud are “on a par with Holocaust deniers,” as she tarred us skeptics on February 3, 2007.

I’m not holding my carbon-dioxide-polluting breath.

Cheney Reaction

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show yesterday, and during the course of that interview Mr. Cheney said of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to bring Guantanamo Bay prisoners to New York City for a civilian trial, “I think it’ll give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Now, the phrase “aid and comfort to the enemy” is not your average term of art, and it would be impossible to believe that the former Vice President isn’t aware of its origin. Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution of the United States reads, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

So yesterday the former Vice President of the United States accused the current Attorney General of the United States — and by implication his boss, the President of the United States — of treason.

Historically when a former official makes a charge of treason against a current official, it’s considered an act of sedition — or at least cause for a duel to the death.

These days the reaction is: *Yawn*.

I’m not one of those who, like many of the left, thought Dick Cheney was the very devil, only because I’ve read the Constitution and noted that the only actual power a sitting Vice President of the United States has — aside from being transported to a secure location any time the President might be in danger — is to break a tie vote as President of the Senate. So anything nefarious that Dick Cheney did while he was President George W. Bush’s Vice President, as far as I’m concerned, gets blamed on President George W. Bush. Any of President Bush’s cabinet appointments had more actual authority than Dick Cheney. The average undersecretary had more actual authority under any chain of command than Cheney.

George Washington’s Vice President, John Adams, described it as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Vice President Truman called his office, “about as useful as a cow’s fifth teat.” Humorist Finley Peter Dunne was quoted in the movie Advise and Consent for his quip, “Being vice president is not a crime exactly. You can’t be sent to jail for it, but it’s kind of a disgrace.”

One is therefore reminded of the reply William F. Buckley, Jr., made to my friend Brad Linaweaver when Brad told the practicing Roman Catholic that he was a lapsed Episcopalian. Said Buckley: “That’s not going very far, Mr. Linaweaver.”

So Dick Cheney going from the powerlessness of being Vice President to the irrelevancy of being a former Vice President — without even the comforts of former Vice President Al Gore’s Academy Award and Nobel Peace Prize — is likewise not going very far.

When it comes to his opinions being completely irrelevant, Dick Cheney must be finding out that he is uncomfortably close to being — well — me.

What If Nicole Brown Had Been Tried for O.J. Simpson’s Murder?

I wrote a book in 1999 about the O.J. Simpson case titled The Frame of the Century? In that book I dissect the evidence brought out in both trials and show that the molehill, rather than mountain, of evidence against the Heisman Trophy winner may indicate that Simpson may have walked into the crime scene before the police arrived, but there is no evidence that he was the killer. I show in my book how even this conclusion could have been part of a frame-up of Simpson by the actual murderer — and suggest an individual with the means, opportunity, and possible motive to have done it — and my friend, William C. Dear, has produced an award-winning documentary, The Overlooked Suspect, giving even stronger evidence that the Brentwood-adjacent murders might have been committed by O.J. Simpson’s oldest son from his first marriage, Jason Simpson.

The murder conviction in an Italian court of cute American blonde Amanda Knox now has Bill O’Reilly, United States Senator Maria Cantwell, CBS 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all willing to consider that she might be innocent.

By contrast, O.J. Simpson, who was actually acquitted in his criminal trial, is still regarded as guilty.

This makes me think that if the Bruno Magli had been on the other foot, and the gorgeous blonde Nicole had been tried on similar evidence for her black ex-husband’s murder, Nicole Brown’s conviction would have left less of a public verdict of guilt than Simpson’s acquittal did.

Say it with me: double standard.

There is more sympathy for the convicted murderer Amanda Knox in the American media — because she’s fuckable — than there is for the Oscar-winning Polish Jew Roman Polanski, whose plea bargain in an American court for sex with an underage woman was so contaminated by judicial misconduct that even his alleged victim, Samantha Geimer, wants him freed.

You’ve Just Crossed Over To … The Gun-Free Zone

It’s now been 36 days since disarmed soldiers and civilians were massacred and wounded by a single gunman on Fort Hood, and it’s been 30 days since I revealed in my November 11th column that a Clinton Administration revision to Department of Defense Directive 5210.56 — Army Regulation 190-14, dated 12 March 1993 — removed from base commanders the power to authorize arming soldiers under their command and transferred crippled authority to the politically-appointed Secretary of the Army with standards paralleling the Clinton Administration’s civilian pro-gun-control agenda.

When I first wrote about Army Regulation 190-14 I failed to note that the document was marked “declassified.” I only recently figured out that this means when the Clinton Administration first issued that new regulation they did it in secret.

President Obama, in his only speech to the United Stated Military Academy at West Point on December 1, 2009, made no mention of Fort Hood. Nor has the White House announced any revision of Army Regulation 190-14 that would allow base commanders to arm soldiers on base to harden their vulnerability to attack.

Meanwhile, on December 4, 2009, the Faculty Council at Colorado State University recommended to CSU President Tony Frank to ban firearms on campus, over the objection of the student government which asked Frank to leave the current policy which permits holders of Concealed-Carry Firearms licenses to carry on campus. This Faculty Council joins those in 49 states — Utah being the only exception — which after repeated campus massacres still denies students and faculty the right to save their own lives.

How many more disarmed victims must die, Mr. President, before you will act?

Or is it even remotely possible you have acted to allow base commanders to arm soldiers on base but are so ashamed of doing the right thing that you ordered the new policy classified?

Catch A Tiger By Its Toe

Oh no you didn’t!

Neil, I can’t believe you used that subtitle. Don’t you remember what the original was?

Yeah, but I didn’t use the original. And the version I learned as a kid growing up in the Northeast — the one I did use — is just too perfect for what I’m about to write. So fears of political-incorrectness dealt with, let’s move on.

Why is Tiger Woods in trouble? For what reason is the private life of this sports legend subject to endless vivisection by the sewer media?

Let’s break this down.

Tiger Woods had a moving violation which cost him $164 and four points on his Florida drivers’ license. He can ditch the four points by spending another $9.95 and attending an online traffic school approved by all Florida counties. No, I’m not being compensated for the link. Tiger Woods is a billionaire. I don’t think the $173.95 matters to him.

And — let’s add this up — Tiger Woods is (a) a sports legend; (b) world famous; (c) incredibly rich; and (d) a good-looking guy in great physical shape. If there is any man alive who can spend the rest of his life fucking every beautiful woman who crosses his path, this is the guy. He actually has the possibility of leaving Hugh Hefner in his dust.

He was also smart enough to have a prenup with his wife that protects his fortune.

So — as Robin Williams asks repeatedly about subject after subject in his latest HBO special, Robin Williams: Weapons of Self Destruction, what the fuck?

It’s not like Tiger Woods needs to worry that his reputation will be so damaged by marital infidelity that any loss of commercial endorsements will lose him his mansions and send him to live in the projects. If he never made another dime he’s set for life. He could bugger Jack Nicklaus and the loss of endorsements wouldn’t affect his lifestyle.

So why doesn’t Tiger Woods bare his claws, growl, and simply go on Letterman and say, “I like having sex with a lot of women. It’s great. You know what I mean, Dave. If my wife doesn’t like it she doesn’t have to be Mrs. Tiger Woods. And the rest of you out there are just insanely jealous.”

Once — just once — couldn’t our society tolerate an ounce of self-honesty?

If you defended your right to live your life according to your own standards, Tiger Woods, then you’d really be my hero.