Last night was the third time this decade I didn't bother with the Academy Awards.  It looks like I wasn't alone, since news reports say last night's broadcast was perhaps the least-watched ever.  Compare that with the second-most-watched event ever on t.v., the last Super Bowl with an estimated audience of over 90 million.

Before the Super Bowl, there was a segment where various NFL stars and others, including some military folks, recited the Declaration Of Independence.  It was hard to keep a dry eye, I tell ya.  This year's Oscars had a segment where a group of soldiers serving in Iraq, via satellite, presented the award for best short documentary.  And right after that was another documentary award for an anti-war film that made our military into evil redneck killing bastards.  I'd never heard of it, but then again, most of the public hasn't seen any of the other anti-war movies either.  Jon Stewart injected liberal politics into the show and several celebs showed up wearing orange ribbons and bracelets to show solidarity with...wait for it...the terrorists locked up at Guantanamo!

That's right.  Today's Hollywood doesn't show solidarity with our troops but with foreign jihadists.

It's a saying that politics is show business for ugly people.  Having lived in the D.C. area for 14 years, I can attest that there are just as many horror stories about uppity diva politicians as there are about uppity diva celebrities in NYC or L.A..  A Capitol Hill staffer is no different from a personal assistant.  Little wonder then politicians and celebrities are mutually attracted to the glamour and power of their respective professions.  The celebrities love the access to "real" political power and the appearance of substance while the pols love the star power only a celebrity could provide.

Even though I think a performer is a citizen too and is certainly free to run for office (it seems like the Republican ones do so far more often than their outspoken liberal counterparts), I've long disliked the idea that a candidate is worthwhile only because a bold-faced name supports that person.  Only 16-year-olds and folks who live by People magazine and TMZ.com, i.e. people who really should not or cannot vote, fall for that sort of thing.  Look at all of the hipster celebs falling over backwards to get behind Barack Obama for no other reason than he fits four important criteria:  1) he's liberal 2) he's not a bad-looking guy 3) he makes them feel good for voting for him and 4) his youthfulness.  It's Hollywood and it's the Upper West Side; they don't care about substance over there in those places.  I've seen it happen all before with Slick Willie in 1992.

As for the few brave souls who openly embrace Republican candidates, I salute their courage in a town that considers anyone to the right of Chairman Mao a Right Wing Christian Extremist, but then again, it ought not matter much that Adam Sandler or Sly Stallone endorses a candidate either.

Not only is putting your political trust in an actor or rock star stupid, it's also dangerous.  In the 1930s, all of the hip people in Germany who weren't Jewish or Communists got behind Adolf Hitler.  The Nazis went right to what remained of Germany's excellent film industry to get involved with the propaganda machinery.  The results were such fine propaganda films as "Triumph of the Will" and "Kolberg."  The Soviets in Russia also used the cool people in its film industry to sell Communism to its public, whether it liked it or not.  All of these talented, yet clueless, people lent their names and abilities to some of the worst regimes on Earth.  Leni Riefenstahl may have been one heck of a filmmaker but her choice in political support helped bring on the deaths of millions.

Today's dimbulb stars don't show any more judgment.  Movie stars and models have cozied up to the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, not caring very much about the folks these respective dictators have oppressed in the name of socialism or whatever.

Just think about that the next time you sit through that "Yes, I Can" video.

     I admit I'm not a fan of "24," but I have watched several episodes.  While it was never a conservative show per se, it was a show that respected the American conservative's world view, particularly when it came to the War on Terror.  The show's producer is a known conservative and the program became a favorite with folks like Vice President Cheney and talk show host Laura Ingraham, etc..  In the process, it created a new t.v. hero, a Die Hard for the small screen in the persona of Jack Bauer, terrorist butt-kicker extraordinaire.  Always on the go--there was only a day to save the world after all--he had little time for the niceties of political correctness and wasn't above smacking around a terrorist to get him to talk.  This was of course an exception rather than the rule in Hollywood, which has produced movie after movie and show after show where the war on terror "goes too far" and poor innocents are needlessly tortured.

     But it looks like the writers can no longer swallow their vomit and keep pumping out scripts they disagreed with.  Poor ratings last season gave them carte blanche to "reimagine" the show to make Bauer and his adventures more palpable to their tastes.  They saw their chance to get invited to the right cocktail parties again.  First, ex-Air America host and all-around pain-in-the-butt Janeane Garofalo is cast on the show.  Then "24" proudly announces it's going to be the first "carbon neutral" show in town, complete with Kiefer Sutherland doing environmental PSAs.  The nail in the coffin though, is the direction the writers planned to take Bauer.  One idea even had him building huts in Africa!  It looks like now Bauer will be hauled in front of Congress to answer for the sins of previous seasons.  It's nothing more than a sham for the writers to expound (via various self-righteous pols) on the evils of torturing those who plan to murder thousands of people.  Eeek!

     Conservative fans of "24" are verklempt.  Many are vowing not to tune in this season.  Frankly, I think this is it for the program.  The liberal cognosceti will simply dismiss it as viewers tiring of terrorism as a topic.  The truth is most high-concept shows struggle creatively after about four or five years anyway and last season's episodes just weren't that good.  This reimaging won't work any better than Bo and Luke Duke's "cousins" on "The Dukes of Hazzard."  But at least the left-wing writers will be free to scribble more anti-war movies.

    

First of all, a note.  This is going to be the last purely political post I'm making here.  I've decided I might be more motivated if instead I focus exclusively on pop culture stuff.  For one thing, there are not that many right of center bloggers who comment on pop culture and many of the ones who do, IMO, don't really get it.  Getting it is important now because for better or worse, our society is led nosewise by the popular culture.

Now on to my post.  If you're anything like me, you're lamenting how this election season promises to be the worst since 1976, when America had the Sophie's Choice between Gerald "there's no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" Ford and Jimmy "Malaise" Carter.  We know what kind of deal we got out of that election, don't we? 

 

As it stands, we will choose between a Marxist from the Democratic party sworn to tax the bejeebers out of us, take away our Second Amendment rights, expand the role of an ever increasingly intrusive government, put a bunch of Ruth Bader Ginsburg clones in the federal courts, cut and run out of Iraq and possible Afghanistan as well, eviscerate our military, and keep our borders flung wide open...and possibly a D.C. establishment Republican who will do most of what I've already mentioned.  He'd put a bunch of David Souter clones on the benches, but is there really much of a difference? 

Worse yet, the two Democratic frontrunners have connections to megalomaniacal commie billionaire George Soros...as does the possible GOP nominee.  Imagine that...no matter who wins, Soros wins.  Eeek!

So how did we end up at this point?  For one thing, conservatives didn't have the right standard bearer.  Bush left no successor.  The Democrats and media picked off promising stars like George Allen and Rick Santorum before election season got rolling.  The amounts of money needed to run a campaign allowed mostly the super-rich or the highly-connected to get in, neither of which are known to be terribly conservative.  Fred Thompson got in too late and ran a terrible campaign.  Nobody knew who the hell Duncan Hunter was.  Tom Tancredo was written off as a one-note candidate and disdained by the pro-open borders GOP establishment.  And that left us our current crop of contenders.

But there's another problem.  You see, for 27 years the moderate-to-liberal Checker Pants crowd put up with us conservatives because they knew the GOP needed us to win elections.  Secretly, they never liked us.  We're too pious, too distrustful of government and institutions.  We made them look like geeks on the D.C. cocktail circuit.  Left to their own devices, they legislated and governed as Diet Democrats.  Around election time, they'd go back to telling us what we wanted to hear and reminding us that their opponents were the worse alternative.  For the most part, they were right.

Now, however, they think they don't need us anymore.  If John McCain is the nominee, they think more moderate to conservative Democrats and Independents will crossover to vote for him, making up for conservatives who decide to sit out the election or vote third party.  I think they're wrong; the media is setting up a pig in a poke for the McCain campaign.  But they love the idea of being able to win elections without those Bible thumpers, small government libertarians, crazy right-to-lifers, uppity talk show hosts and pundits, and unsophisticated gun freaks.

Unfortunately, there's no conservative King Arthur waiting in the wings to rescue us in 2012 or 2016.  At least not one I can see.  By then, when America has turned into Canusixco and most of the electorate is addicted to the crack of entitlements, will it make any difference?

     New Hampshire just showed the world two things:  1)  Hillary Clinton is just like a horror movie villain...just as everybody thinks he's dead, he reaches up and snatches your ankle.  2)  the media is desperately trying to write the results before the voters have their say, ergo the egg all over the faces of those predicting the Hildebeast's demise. 

     The media however was successful in hyping Mike Huckabee's and John McCain's candidacies to victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.  It played a big part in helping B. Hussein Obama's victory in Iowa as well.  This was after it decided he was a hunkier leading man than Cacklin' Hillary.

 

     The end result is that there is no clear frontrunner for either party.  I still think Hillary will in the end pull it off for the Democrats, but it's murkier on the Republican side.  The obsession with focus groups, pre-voting polls, entrance polls, exit polls, and endless jibjabbery on t.v. is creating a faux reality that has little to do with what voters are really concerned about or who they really support.  Republican voters, particularly conservatives, don't really trust the media in the first place, so they're not all banding around one or even two guys yet.   The Fredheads are hanging in there as are the Duncan Hunter supporters, and we'll not even get into the Paulistas.  As someone who has been leaning towards Romney for a while, I resent the frequent drumbeat of the punditry that he needs to win NOW or he's toast even though I don't get to vote in my state's primary until Februrary.  That's 22 states on the same day, people.   Let me make the decision, not you guys.

     The MSM and its polling handmaidens have been making more and more errors in trying to play Miss Cleo with the election process.  They listen to what the echo chamber is saying and that produces embarrassing results from the networks calling Florida prematurely in 2000 to early claims based on exit polling (as polls were still open) that it was going to be a blowout for Kerry in 2004 to the Comeback Girl's win in New Hampshire last night.  I'm fed up with the second-guessing and the blatant engineering based on who the MSM likes now and who (at least among the GOP) is likely to easy pickins in the general election.

     After all, we the people are supposed to be in the voting booth, not the media.

So, yet another celebrity (Jessica Alba) is pregnant and unmarried.  As with other recent pregnant and unmarried celebrities like Nicole Richie and Halle Berry, the media will gush over the "wonderful" news, what Miss Alba is buying for her baby, the fabulous shower that will cost more than what most of us make in a year, whether it's a boy or a girl, and what bizarro name will be bestowed upon the tot when he or she is born in one of those expensive suites at Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

There's little likelihood of a quick wedding ceremony between now and then.  After all, a wedding befit a movie princess takes too long to plan and just won't get done before the baby arrives.  That's if she even wants to marry the guy. 

It used to be embarrassing for any girl to be in this situation and at the very least, one kept the pregnancy quiet until well after the quick civil wedding ceremony.  But now to the mass media, it's no big deal.  We're supposed to be happy for these people and not pass any sort of judgment on them.  Having babies with men you're not married to and may never be married to hunky dory to the cognosceti.  Speak out and you'll be told you're a horrible ol' meanie and you need to get with it.  Marriage is for losers and there's no point to committing to a relationship that won't last anyway.  (Unless you're gay...then marriage rocks.)

 

Pro-lifers like me would also be called hypocritical and unfair...we'd condemn these chicks either way.  They can't win.

 

Don't get me wrong.  Even under the circumstances, I'm glad these women are choosing life.  I can also have empathy for a 40-year-old woman like Halle Berry who hears the biological clock ticking loudly but has had a lot of lousy relationships with men, beginning with her father abandoning her early in life.  The issue is they are not choosing marriage before setting out to start a family. 

Why is this a problem?  Because these women have a lot of money and don't face a lot of social disapproval from the media, overly-forgiving fans, or their peers, the pratfalls of having babies through uncommitted relationships are not apparent to them or the public.  They can afford a small army of nannies and materially, these kids won't lack for anything.

But they will experience a lot of the same problems I see with kids in the juvvy system, whose dads are out of the picture and mom is either working two jobs to support them or collecting welfare.  Boys grow up thinking they're never responsible for the babies that they make.  After all, mom did just swell on her own and he did just fine without a permanent daddy in the house.  No need to make an honest woman out of a pregnant girlfriend.  Or two.  Or three.  Girls grow up thinking no man will ever commit to her, so there's no reason to wait for Mr. Right.  You just raise the babies on your own; it's easier without some jerk guy hassling you anyway.  And what takes the place of a real family?  Peer groups who push dope, booze, and all around rotten behavior, whether it's catting around town or getting into fights.  They may have some money in the bank and fancy cars, but they're just as broken inside as any kid on the street.

I find it strange that these celebrities want to influence what we wear, buy, see, and do but they never want to take any responsibility for glamorizing having kids out of wedlock.  It's not glamourous to a teenage girl who's ill-prepared for motherhood on her own or the single mom who might be able to provide the basics but not much more for her children.  It's not glamourous to the sons who grow up without a dad in the home to guide them to manhood or the daughters abandoned by their fathers, pretty much wrecking their outlook on the opposite sex for life.  Just for once I'd like to see one of these actresses who had babies without benefit of marriage to just come out and say, "You know what?  It was hard raising 'em on my own."

What is it about every U.S. president since Carter and the delusion that some good ol' fashioned American diplomacy can singlehandedly solve "the mideast crisis," a polite and morally relativistic euphemism for the Arab/Islamic world's 59-year war on Israel?  It's like the Greek myth of Tantalus, the poor schlub condemned for all eternity to have grapes dangling just out of his reach and water that ducks down just out of reach as he wants to drink it.  Every administration, Democrat or Republican, thinks it has the magical solution that will bring hugs, kisses, and the Nobel Prize its way.  

And every single time, it ends the same way.  Israel--whether it's led by a center-right or center-left government at the time--makes concessions in return for intangible promises from the Palestinians, who never keep them.  The Palis make excuses and then make more demands.  More splodeydopes kill innocents on Israeli buses and in busy streets, more missiles end up in Israeli backyards, and Israel has less territory from where it can adequately defend itself.  Then our officials are shocked that somehow it didn't work out this time and worse yet, they sometimes scapegoat Israel for the last peace process's failure.

 

So pardon my lack of optimism about this latest joke of a peace conference in Annapolis, MD.  Look, I may not have a lot of fancy pants PhDs and the closest I've come to Foggy Bottom is taking the Metro when I used to live in the D.C. area.  But the whole thing can be summarizes as thus:  the Palis don't just want their own country.  If that's all they wanted, this would've been solved a long time ago.  They want one thing and one thing only:  the end of Israel.  You see, the Arabs/Muslims just don't want Jewish folks in their 'hood.  The fact that the postage stamp sized nation of 6 million or so has managed to hold off its enemies and thrive without a drop of oil to its name while most of its neighbors are living in crapitude just drives the Arabs even more crazy.  But they are also very patient.  As long as there is hope they can succeed at driving all of the Jews out of Israel, even if it takes 500 or a thousand years, they'll keep up with the merry-go-round of terrorism, caterwauling, demanding, and pretending to be reasonable on occasion.  Absolutely nothing is going to change.

There are only two ways this war on Israel will end:  a) Israel ceases to exist as a Jewish state or b) the Arabs/Muslims give up and accept Israel's existence.  I hope the former never happens, while I'm not optimistic the latter will happen any time soon.  So, just leave Israel be and let it do what it must to survive.

Like the Queen song goes, "Another one bites the dust."

Redacted, an anti-Iraq war film described by liberal Slate.com as "antiwar porn" and by conservative movie critic Michael Medved as the worst film he's ever seen, enjoyed a craptacular opening this past weekend.  Last weekend, the bigger-budget star vehicle Lions For Lambs suffered a similar fate.  Other recent anti-war el floppos include Rendition and The Valley of Elah.  No amount of pre-release hype, major stars, big-name directors, or lavish praise from largely left-leaning film critics has drawn people into the theaters to see these films.

They say in the business that the audience votes with its feet.  Why did the audience then vote to take its feet to Bee Movie instead of Lions For Lambs?

I think I know what's going on.  It often takes a couple of years for a script to go down the pipeline from word processor to production to release.  At the time a whole slew of these movies were in development, popular opinion seemingly was against the war in Iraq, or at least the way things were going.  News reports were full of The Daily Carnage and hype of an impending civil war.  Hollywood saw this as an opportunity to return to the Good Old Days of the '60s and '70s, when faltering public support for our efforts in Vietnam resulted in a slew of movies that were antiwar and implicitly against the whole American Way of Life.  The Paul Haggises and Brian DePalmas and Robert Redfords rubbed their hands at the prospect of making The Film that finally sends Middle America into the streets to march alongside Cindy Sheehan and Co. and maybe even get Bush/Cheney thrown in the brig for good measure.

There were three problems Hollywood never forsaw.  One is that American taste for agitprop vanished sometime back in the '80s.  People don't want to be informed by movie stars and directors anymore.  They simply want to spend their ten bucks on being entertained.  Hollywood figured that perhaps the foreign market, eager for anything that makes America look bad, would turn out in droves for this stuff.  Except that even foreign movie goers would rather spend their euros and yen on Transformers than preachy pretentious crud too. 

Two, few Americans outside of leftist enclaves view the U.S. of A. as a pit of evil and the rotten treatment Vietnam veterans got from the antiwar crowd has permanently left a distaste for anything that makes a blanket slam against our military.

Three, Hollywood never thought to itself, "Gee, what if this Iraq thing turns around?"  It's almost hilarious to see a slew of these antiwar movies come out just as violence in Iraq is decreasing and stability seems to be a reachable goal.  You see, this is not a nation of navel-gazing pacifists.  We just wanted the mission to succeed.

Oh well.

     The latest celebrity embarrassment involves Dwayne "Dog" Chapman, star of A&E's hit series Dog:  The Bounty Hunter.  Chapman was recorded speaking to his son on the phone (I don't think the kid's ever been on the show), urging him to dump a girlfriend.  Chapman apparently didn't trust this girlfriend but what stirred up the controversy was his frequent use of the n-word.  The kicker is that said girlfriend is black. 

     As Chapman figured in the recording, the fallout resulted in A&E putting the t.v. show on hiatus immediately.  A&E is a relentlessly p.c. network so don't go looking for the program to return any time soon.

     It's hard to defend Chapman.  I love Dog:  The Bounty Hunter.  It's always fun watching crooks get their just desserts and Chapman is portrayed as a tough guy who's lived a hard life but nonetheless has a heart of gold.  Often after they take down a fugitive, Chapman and his family are counseling him to change his life.  I still don't think he's a bad guy.  I know that in some socioeconomic circles, the n-word is just tossed around as no big deal.  They say it because everybody around them says it.  But Chapman knows better and the recording indicates he knows full well that using the n-word is at the very least controversial if not flat out wrong.  If he's so concerned with the public knowing he uses racist language, why not make a concerted effort to try and change it?  Is it really that difficult not to use the n-word? 

     Yet he's not the only pinhead in this situation.  The person who leaked the recording to the National Enquirer is none other than the son who was arguing about the girlfriend.  How bad is this young man's relationship with his father that he has to betray him like that?  For all of Chapman's faults, this was a family issue.  Now it's public and the entire family has to suffer.  What a selfish, vindictive creep. 

     If Chapman ever ends up back on the air, let's just hope that aside from the expected trips to rehab or some other sort of contrition, he gets some family counseling as well.

    There are times when I, a conservative female, wonder why so many of my sex are such suckers.  The fact that Lifetime exists plays into every male chauvinist's assumptions about women.

    Turn on the hen session that's "The View" and see a bunch of broads talking out their rear ends about stuff they know nothing about.  At least the stage is full of uneducated "comedians" and media stars.  But what's truly terrifying is the audience.  The audience is mostly female and they applaud with enthusiasm every bit of foolishness the yakkers spout out.  And most of it is stuff that blantantly appeals to emotion.

    On various fashion message boards, I see the same sort of cheap emotionalism that leads to knee-jerk liberalism.  For all of the talk of independence and liberation, the feminists simply transferred women's dependence on men to dependence on government.  And too few women don't see that.  

    Perhaps it's in our wiring and in our hormones.  It's our nature to worry and liberalism offers the reassurance that Big Government will make sure that if all else fails, they won't be bag ladies and their children won't die from the bubonic plague while living on the streets.  And unfortunately, women tend not to think too much on who will pay for Big Government.

    Liberalism also plays on sentiments that it can clean up the world so that there's no war, violence, or hurt feelings and everybody can go through life without being untidy.  Get a gander of Sally Field's dopey statements at the Emmys to see what I mean.

    I wish more women would wake up and stop looking at Big Government as a substitute Daddy or Hubby.