"Ha-Ha! How's It Feel To Know You've Been Cheated?"

Now that we've got the whole "gay" marriage thing out of the way, and can go back to telling the truth, here's the Harvey Milk biopic I'd pay to see:

No political figures were more gushing in their praise of [cult leader Jim Jones] than Willie Brown and Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s rising tribune of gay freedom. Milk, a perennial candidate for office until he finally won a supervisor’s seat in 1977, aggressively sought Jones’s political blessing. “Our paths have crossed,” Milk wrote Jones during an earlier campaign for supervisor, in a letter filled with the kind of awed reverence that the cult leader demanded from his followers. “They will stay crossed. It is a fight that I will walk with you into . . . The first time I heard you, you made a statement: ‘Take one of us, and you must take all of us.’ Please add my name.” 

Not content to hear dignitaries whisper flatteries into his ear, Jones staged a testimonial banquet in his own honor and demanded that politicians in his debt offer him public tribute. On the evening of September 25, 1976, the Peoples Temple headquarters on Geary Boulevard was converted into a formal dining hall with linen tablecloths and floral arrangements. At the head table sat Mayor Moscone, District Attorney Freitas, and Assemblyman Willie Brown, who acted as the evening’s exuberant master of ceremonies. As he introduced the man of the hour to the overflow audience, Brown reached new heights of shameless, ass-kissing puffery. “Let me present to you,” Brown roared, “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao.” By the time Jones rose to tumultuous applause, he seemed likely to walk on water.

Can you picture it? I can picture it. A lot of reds. C'mon, you've just gotta get the feeling. Where's Oliver Stone when you need him? Michael Moore? We need a re-revisionary:

Because Milk and Moscone were murdered so soon after the Jonestown tragedy, there was immediate speculation that Peoples Temple was somehow involved. Ann Kronenberg, Milk’s hand- picked successor, told Milk biographer Randy Shilts, that when she first heard Milk was murdered, she thought Jim Jones was responsible. Rumors began to circulate (and some persist today) of obscure connections between Jim Jones and Milk’s murderer, Dan White. Vague rumors of a falling out between Milk and Jones also surfaced. One story has it that Milk asked Peoples Temple to remove his name from the church’s list of supporters when reports of violence and theft first came to light, and that he was outraged when the Temple failed to comply with his demand. Eventually, history settled on an official story: Jim Jones was a master manipulator who used unwitting local politicians to gain power for himself. The politicians, including Milk and Moscone, used Jones for volunteers and votes, while remaining personally distant and blissfully unaware of rumors of Temple violence, abuse, theft and even murder. The timing of Dan White’s murderous rampage was deemed coincidental. 

 

However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that Harvey Milk was a strong advocate for Peoples Temple and Jim Jones during his political career, including the tumultuous year leading up to the Jonestown tragedy. Milk spoke at the Temple often, wrote personal letters to Jim Jones, contacted other elected officials on the Temple’s behalf, and used space in his weekly column to support the works of the Temple, even after the negative New West article went to press. Milk appeared in the pages of the Peoples Forum, the Temple newspaper, and received over fifty letters of sympathy from the residents of Jonestown when his lover, Jack Lira, killed himself in September 1978. 



It is readily apparent from the letters and historical memorabilia that Milk and the Temple enjoyed a mutually supportive relationship until their concurrent deaths. Why then is the relationship such a secret, even taboo to discuss? The only biography of Milk to date, The Mayor of Castro Street, by Randy Shilts, downplays the Milk/Temple relationship, even going so far as to paint Milk as one of the countless people who cruelly ridiculed and ostracized the surviving Temple members and their supporters. Like most historians, Shilts opted for an image of an expedient politician, instead of truthfully portraying how Milk worked with Peoples Temple until the end of his life. 

 

Enough time has passed since Milk’s brutal murder to reanalyze this relationship, to explore how and why Harvey Milk supported Peoples Temple,...Harvey Milk irrefutably supported Peoples Temple. 



It may be understandable why in November 1978 the supporters of Milk would attempt to distance the newly martyred supervisor from the still-unfolding horrors of Jonestown. However, we as witnesses, historians, researchers and writers have an obligation to tell future generations the whole truth, as we understand it, to record as much documentation as possible and let the biases and subsequent interpretations transform over time,... 

 

If Milk supported Peoples Temple, now is the pivotal time for us to unveil the truth,...It is most important that we not participate in or settle for the revisionism and obfuscation that has passed for the historical account of this relationship to date.

You mean like Will & Grace covered for - oh, never mind,...

 

Let's Put A Space Probe In Hugo Chávez's Brain

Hugo Chávez, he of the televised multi-hour conspiracy theory rant - and Noam Chomsky-loving, necrophiliac, socialist cult of personality in Venuzuela - is at it again. Keep in mind, this is the guy who had Sean Penn and Oliver Stone, amongst others, hooked on his every word during the Bush administration. (He famously claimed to smell "sulfur" emanating from George W. Bush, back in 2006, when Chávez spoke after him at the U.N. in New York.) Oliver Stone even went so far as to make a documentary about him, claiming Chávez is "misunderstood". See if you understand this:

Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.

"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.

Got that? Understand it? I do - the man runs a cult - and it's "logic" like this that absolutely proves it. I don't care how high he's risen in politics:

Hugo Chávez is 100% nuts.

The Dark Knight Is Here (And The Dark Son Sets)

Whoo, buddy, y'all done gone and done it now:

Assassination in American history has pretty regularly been the blessèd resort of the Left. Start with Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered the very conservative William McKinley; turn next to Harry Orchard, the union bomber who blew up Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905; turn again to Lee Harvey Oswald, the Marxist who murdered JFK (but whom Oliver Stone tried mightily to redefine as a clandestine conservative); add in Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who tried to attack Gerald Ford in 1975 on behalf of “clean air, healthy water, and respect for creatures and creation,” and Sara Jane Moore, who fired a .38 revolver at Ford a few weeks after Fromme’s abortive attack because the “government had declared war on the left”; and then top it off with John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan who claimed Lee Harvey Oswald as his role model, and you begin to get some sense of how closely the profile of the gun-toting lunatic assassin suits the Left’s enragés. When the Left talks about violence from the Right, the only name it seems able to come up with is that of Timothy McVeigh.

I also seem to remember that the “climate” of nastiness that is supposed to have fostered the Giffords assassination attempt did not spring from the head of the Tea Party. It began long, long ago, sometime between Lyndon Johnson’s anti-Goldwater atom-bomb ads and the election of Richard Nixon, and then accelerated with the election of Ronald Reagan (whom Sam Donaldson badgered at press conferences in a manner unthought-of in the previous history of the Washington press corps). I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when Reagan was gunned down, and I awoke the next day to find an op-ed column in The Daily Pennsylvanian, written by one Dom Manno, a DP staffer, gloating over the shooting and regretting only that the president had survived. Mr. Manno had to be taken in hand by the Secret Service for a brief lesson about the consequences of encouraging assassins, but the lesson Manno’s column taught me was about the serene sense of immunity he had felt in wishing a conservative president dead. The Left, in other words, never notices when it turns politics or journalism into a free-fire zone. It is only when one of its own gets hit in the process that the nastiness becomes unspeakable — but it is still never the Left’s fault for having manufactured the ammunition in the first place.

If we are living now in a time of unprecedented political “vitriol” — and I believe we are, and very much to the detriment of democracy itself — it is a brand of vitriol that was sprayed with relentless generosity on George W. Bush, who was caricatured by The Nation, day by day during his presidency, as a morphed version of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. And it was only yesterday that the Left’s president referred to Republicans as “enemies,” while the Speaker of the Left snarled at her critics as Nazis with swastikas.

Still, the rule of the Left is that nothing committed by the Left is a sin, whether it’s poisoning the political “climate” for the last forty years, or accusing “the Tea Party” and “the Right” of poisoning it when they strike back in kind. This is hypocrisy on a grand-mal scale.

Wow. A NewAger goes on a(nother) killing spree and it unleashes a level of scrutiny on the Left unseen, probably, in it's history? Now who woulda thunk that? (A little late but - hee-hee) Oh, come on, laugh!

Or should we say:

Tell Me Lies (Tell Me Sweet Little Lies)

"I wonder what would happen if a religious group sold 'miracles' with the vague promise that there was a scientific basis for it.

The mystery is why,...junk medicine has become so popular, so much so that that there are now five NHS-funded homeopathic hospitals (yes, taking precious money away from liposuctions for the morbidly obese). As my boss Damian Thompson pointed out in his excellent (grovel) book Counterknowledge, homeopathy is just one part of a trend for irrational belief, from junk history to creationism to conspiracy theories, all of them far more widely held now than they were a generation or two ago.

It’s probably not enough to argue the Chestertonian point that the decline of organised religion has led to paradoxical irrationality, 'misinformation packaged as fact', although there is an element of truth in it (organised religions do at least have mechanisms for dealing with phoneys). Part of the reason that increasing numbers seem to reject western medicine – mankind’s greatest legacy, as anyone who has attended a birth will attest – has to be the wider anti-Westernism in the air, especially coming from the education system, where even established medical and scientific facts are presented as merely 'subjective',...."

-- Ed West, putting two-and-two together - something that's also becoming increasingly difficult for many these days - though math is math, and we've supposedly moved waaaay past beliefs from the days of The Telegraph.

"At one recent session on the Berkeley campus, Scheer (who became the resident leftist columnist for the Los Angeles Times after leaving Ramparts) assured the audience that Ramparts not only smashed retrograde national taboos but 'had very high standards. No question we were putting out as good a journal as anyone in the country. . . . We were edited by professionals, it had to be well written, fact-checked. And the fact is that we did not screw up. I can’t think of a major error.'

Readers can learn from the book, for example, that [Warren] Hinckle indulged every crackpot conspiracy theorist on the JFK assassination. Early in 1967, Ramparts published staff member David Welsh’s claim that there were three assassins in Dallas in 1963. Our resident ex–FBI agent, Bill Turner, then wrote two articles supporting New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent controlled by conspirators deep within the U.S. government. 'Very high standards,' indeed."

-- Sol Stern, giving us another view of how we've got the pop history we now live with - Oliver Stone's paranoid JFK comes to mind as a film influenced by Ramparts's outlook - that we seemingly can't get away from, without the likes of The City Journal.

"[Stephen] Bassett tracks mainstream news coverage of alien-related material. His firm, Paradigm Research Group, has found that the number of English-language articles mentioning the topic increased nearly sixfold between 2006 and 2008—and when we spoke, 2009 was on a record-setting pace. His tally doesn’t include the tabloids, he adds, or recent coverage on CNN, Fox News, ABC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and, of course, the Sci-Fi Channel. From ghost hunters and UFO hunters to alien autopsies and secret societies, the schedules of previously sober TV stations now resemble a giant nightly X-Conference."

-- Timothy Lavin, reflecting on George Norry's Coast To Coast, AM - America's much-loved, late-night paranormal gabfest - and what it has in common with the deceptively-titled, Ramparts-influenced, "mainstream" media of today, in The Atlantic.

Wardrobe's Done: Quick - Start Filming

"Someone asked a great question the other day: Why is leftist Hollywood so enamored with dictators and socialism? You would think they would fear having their artistic expression stifled under a Castro or having all their wealth confiscated under Hugo’s socialist or communist regime. It seems counter-intuitive, no…? That’s a damn good question but erroneously based on the premise that we’re discussing normal people.

When you and I picture life under Obama’s vision for America, we see a dreary existence spent in breadlines, drab apartments and small jail cells with rat cages strapped to our face conditioning us to say 'Herstory' instead of 'History.' These Castro-lovers and Polanski-defenders see something completely different.

Watch 'The Lives of Others.' Not only is it one of the best films of the decade, it also answers the opening question. You’ll see how life under fascism is the complete fulfillment of every narcissistic desire Susan Sarandon, Barbra Streisand, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and the rest of their sorry lot has ever had."

-- John Nolte, yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre - or, rather, yelling "theatre" in a crowded fire - because (one way or another) you're gonna get burned from Big Hollywood.

This Is Why We Can Never Go Anyplace "Nice"

"Oliver Stone has never been one for shying away from controversy, building a long and largely successful filmography around some of history's most talked-about figures. So is it any wonder that Stone's next project might just involve the infamous Charles Manson? 



Variety is reporting that the murder of Sharon Tate and the activities of the Manson Family cult – the subject of prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi's widely-known book Helter Skelter -- may be turned into a feature film by the director."

-- Christopher Monfette, forcing us to scream "It's about fucking time!" in front of the little ones - destroying all the God damned serenity around here - and badly affecting tiny IGN.com.

Oh No!! Say It Ain't So!!!: The Cult Of Obama's Overwhelming The World Of Reason (.Com)!!!

"I've watched with growing distress this past week as many interesting cultural iconoclasts I admire for various reasons who can usually be counted on to be aware and skeptical of government power to at least some degree, from John Perry Barlow to Adam Parfre to Oliver Stone, have swooned over the mighty Obama and his world-changing powers (my misery over this is maximized by many friends and acquaintances who are not public figures as well).

Being surrounded by a creepy-happy adoring Cult of the Great Leader makes me...uncomfortable, to be sure. Via Will Wilkinson comes a particularly awful example of Obamania, in which we are advised via Beatles lyrics both of our responsibility to not let Obama down, and also showered with the adoring love we must express for him."

-- Brian Doherty, joining the ranks of political folks who don't think TMR is crazy after all, but showing a lot of Reason.

The View: A Totally Outrageous Mish-Mash Of Common Sense (And Cringe-Making Crazy)

Our Bad Story Teller (With A Head Like A Stone) And One Of Our Last Great American Statesmen

“[Oliver Stone] and his cast plainly don’t understand George W. Bush so they,...settle for a two-hour Saturday Night Live sketch that skims every surface.

Stone still cannot fathom how Bush won four huge elections, thrice bested the man universally acknowledged to be the country’s best debater in 2000 and inspired millions in (to cite a few examples) his speech atop the rubble at the World Trade Center, his Convention address in 2004 and in his second inaugural in 2005. Astonishing but true: Stone simply skips over all of these signature moments because they don’t fit Stone’s one joke about a bumbler who drifted to the top and destroyed the world.

To put it another way: the film does not show the courageous choice to launch the Surge and the way it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, but does show the pretzel-choking incident, during which the president is shown wearing a novelty T-shirt with a dog on it.

Except for (perhaps) a scene in which Bush is shown breaking down and praying for salvation, there is not a single moment that shows any reason why anyone would support such an imbecile; in its determined omissions, it’s a bigger insult to the 62 million who voted for Bush than to the man himself.”

— Kyle Smith, on another piece of Hollywood tripe that'll never see a dime from me, or Pajamas Media

On his own site, Mr. Smith adds:

Stone served in Vietnam and says, “I did not like Nixon. I suffered, like many people suffered under him, in Vietnam.” OK! Except, according to this extremely detailed fansite, Stone served in Vietnam in 1967-1968. MSN’s Encarta Encyclopedia agrees that Stone served from 1967-68. That means his suffering–all of it–was under Lyndon Johnson."

Who, I might add, was a Democrat. My favorite Dem, actually: he'd take his pants off - in public!

A Reasonable Man

"What do you think you are, a Kennedy?"

-- George H. W. Bush (James Cromwell), in Oliver Stone's "W", quoted by Variety.

J.F.K. was a different kind of Democrat, the kind that might have read: