Michael Moriarty -- Ripped from the Headlines!

By Nicholas Stix

Michael Moriarty recently attacked me in his Enter Stage Right column, “A journey down the River Stix: The flirtatious dances of fascism.”

As “Hubie” would have said, I was pleased as punch. What an honor, to be personally attacked in print by one of my favorite TV actors. I used to watch Moriarty every week on Law & Order, where he was one of the original co-stars, opposite George Dzundza (and later opposite Paul Sorvino and then Jerry Ohrbach, may he rest in peace), as Executive Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Stone. I loved the way with Moriarty’s Ben Stone, moral gravitas was inseparable from that third-generation (which meanwhile has gone on unto the fourth and fifth generations) Irish nasality, smoother than the nasality of a New York Irish cop, but nonetheless a first cousin to it.

Moriarty still acts, plays piano, sings, and is currently running for president of the United States of America from his home in British Columbia, Canada.

As the years went on, I noticed that increasingly, the “ripped from the headlines” quality that NBC used to sell Law & Order in its ads, was fraudulent. L&O would routinely take murders committed by blacks, but depict the killers as whites, or invent crimes that had either never been committed in New York, or not committed in the last fifty years, such as a white man murdering a black man for grabbing a taxicab ahead of him.

As I’ve written some articles exposing the show’s dishonesty (here and here), L&O’s producers do not number among my fans.

The odd thing about Moriarty’s jeremiad, is that it suffers from the sins of his old L&O boss, Dick Wolf. Moriarty makes empirical statements about life in New York and elsewhere that have no factual basis, and then draws moral conclusions from those false statements. Bad facts, bad logic, bad morals.

Based on a few essays of Moriarty’s that I had read in the past, his “River Stix” essay, and another I just read for background on him, his modus operandi is: 1. To have a basic attitude (“So-and-so is evil”); 2. To engage in stream-of-consciousness writing; 3. To occasionally come up with a good line -- the man has a touch of the poet -- which unfortunately, has no logical connection to what precedes or follows it, and may be mere rhetorical nonsense; and 4. To freely associate between the object of his ire and certain other despised characters from central casting.

In the context of the essay in question, Moriarty says: 1. Rudy Giuliani is a fascist (Boo! Hiss!); 2. Blah, blah, blah; 3. “Mussolini saved the Fuhrer’s bloody paintbrush with that deal in Rome” (nonsense, but it sounds great); and 4. Rudy = Hitler (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = Mussolini (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = wheat or straw (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = NYPD = sodomizing black, illegal immigrant suspects (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = LAPD (Boo! Hiss!)… You get the picture. If you suspect I am misrepresenting Moriarty, read his essay and the column by yours truly that he attacked.

Now, let’s look at those passages of the essay in question that supposedly respond to me.

Moriarty: “The following is taken from an Enter Stage Right article about Rudolph Giuliani [different versions of my column appeared in numerous venues, including Men’s News Daily]:

“‘[New York Times columnist David] Brooks says that a courageous politician shies away from social questions, but that’s hogwash. John McCain is anti-abortion and supports the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. And Giuliani doesn’t shy away from such questions either. He is enthusiastically opposed to respecting American citizens’ Second Amendment rights, and supports gay rights, women’s right to abortion, and the rights of illegal immigrants.’”

“The author of this basically pro-Giuliani profile, Nicholas Stix, never lived under Giuliani’s shining years as mayor. If he did, then he never read Bob Herbert of The New York Times. When the New York Police Department so quickly begins to turn into the Los Angeles Police Department and horror stories of summary executions in Spanish Harlem are listed and the whole series culminates in the torture of a Haitian immigrant in the basement toilet of an NYPD precinct house, well, you have a policy not entirely ordered by the Police Commissioner. You have a Mussolini somewhere in there. Since motive is the first question about crime, who benefited from the miraculous drop in crime? Mayor Giuliani did.”

It would be difficult to pack more dishonesty into a single paragraph than Moriarty did in the preceding one. Far from writing a valentine to Giuliani, I called him a liar of presidential proportions, and noted that under Giuliani, the NYPD engaged in a fraudulent underreporting of crime statistics of revolutionary proportions, a systemic fraud that has continued unabated under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. And as I showed almost seven years ago, a healthy chunk of Giuliani’s reduction in the welfare rolls was achieved through shifting tens of thousands of clients from welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANP) to much better paying federal disability Supplemental Security Income, which is disbursed through the Social Security Administration, and which is not counted in the welfare statistics. I also noted that I did not support Giuliani for president. The aforementioned criticisms notwithstanding, I did say that I consider Giuliani the greatest mayor New York has ever had. That was due to his success at running the city, in the face of the attempt by a racist cabal led by Al Sharpton to get the city burned to the ground, rather than permit a white man to govern it. (Giuliani had beaten the city’s first and only black mayor, socialist David Dinkins, in the 1993 election.)

Last Friday marked twenty years of my having lived continuously in New York City. And not only have I read hundreds of columns by Bob Herbert, but I have mercilessly mocked his dishonesty and racism.

In one of my favorite Herbert columns, about ten years ago a twenty-something black man suspected of auto theft had been shot dead by cops in his car in a fusillade in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The officers had reportedly shouted “freeze,” whereupon the victim reached down for something. It turned out that he was reaching for the anti-car theft device, “the club,” which Herbert assumed the officers should have known. Apparently, being psychic is one of the NYPD’s job requirements. According to Herbert, it turned out that the man was wanted for murder, but Herbert maintained that the police had no way of knowing that. So, in Herbert’s universe, the police must be psychic, when a felony suspect ignores their command and makes a sudden move, but not be psychic, when it comes to knowing that the same guy is a murder suspect. In other words, the cops are always wrong.

In the piece de resistance, Herbert quoted a black hairdresser named Miriam Dorvil, who claimed that while everyone else on the street ate pavement or rolled under a car, she stood in the crossfire, calmly smoking a cigarette. Dorvil added that the officers called the victim the “n-word,” just before shooting him. (Since Herbert did not say the officers in question were black, the reader was led to conclude that white officers had uttered the epithet -- in the heart of black Flatbush!) Herbert did not raise a journalistic eyebrow at any of Dorvil’s claims.

That was during Rudy Giuliani’s first term in office (January 1, 1994-December 31, 1997). Also during that term, Herbert penned a column in which he charged Giuliani with targeting black males, and threatened race riots, if the (non-existent) practice did not stop.

And yet, after spending eight years demonizing Giuliani’s crime policies, Herbert suddenly became a fan of them. In early 2002, Herbert praised the inroads Giuliani had supposedly made against crime. The reason for the about-face: Giuliani had just left office, due to term limits, and been succeeded by Michael Bloomberg. Herbert’s praise for Giuliani was as phony as the attacks he had made on him while he was in office. Herbert was already attacking Bloomberg, and needed a rhetorical straw man for contrast.

On May 19, 2003, five days after New York Times executive editor Howell Raines had publicly confessed that he had only kept incompetent, journalistic fraud Jayson Blair at the Times because of the color of Blair’s skin, Herbert announced,

Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair’s reporting.

A year or two ago, I came across a lefty blogger that considered Herbert an embarrassment, because he mindlessly repeats Democrat Party talking points.

Moriarty: “When the New York Police Department so quickly begins to turn into the Los Angeles Police Department …”

What does that mean? “LAPD, boo, hiss!”? Moriarty sounds like an Upper West Side Lefty who has given up on facts and arguments, and no longer bothers even to spout complete slogans. A well-informed reader is not obliged to guess at a writer’s meaning; even Bob Herbert isn’t that lazy. To read Moriarty, you’d think that the NYPD was constantly committing outrages against blacks. In fact, the majority-white NYPD shows more restraint toward black male suspects than just about any major police force. According to various Washington Post series, the most dangerous police departments in the nation, particularly in their harming of innocent black men, are the black-controlled Washington, DC, Prince George’s County, MD, Detroit and New Orleans forces. The NYPD’s problem is that black racists and white leftists exaggerate every NYPD incident carried out by white officers, ignore incidents for which black officers are responsible, and act as if incidents carried out by Hispanic officers were carried out by whites. Meanwhile, the national media almost never contrast the NYPD’s relatively restrained conduct to the routine violence and corruption of black-dominated police forces. Moriarty: “and horror stories of summary executions in Spanish Harlem are listed and the whole series culminates in the torture of a Haitian immigrant in the basement toilet of an NYPD precinct house, well, you have a policy not entirely ordered by the Police Commissioner. You have a Mussolini somewhere in there. Since motive is the first question about crime, who benefited from the miraculous drop in crime? Mayor Giuliani did.” Have you ever had too much coffee to drink, or too many worries to handle, and lay in bed with your mind racing 1000 miles a minute? That’s the way Michael Moriarty writes. What “summary executions in Spanish Harlem”? At least when Moriarty refers to “the torture of a Haitian immigrant” above and in a later paragraph, I know that he is talking about the 1997 Abner Louima case. Of course, Moriarty even gets that one wrong. He says that the weapon involved was a “nightstick,” when in fact it was a broken broom handle; more importantly, he insinuates that Louima was an illegal immigrant, and that Giuliani had ordered the assault. I am not aware of any reports saying that Louima was an illegal immigrant. As for Moriarty’s contention that Giuliani had a “motive” in the Louima case, I might be able to follow the man’s “logic” if I were tripping on LSD, but I’m not. According to the record and to my knowledge, the August 9, 1997 assault by Officer Justin Volpe on Abner Louima remains unparalleled in the history of the New York City Police Department. Moriarty: “The only plus side was the revelation of New York liberal hypocrisy at its worst. There were no protests about the evolving tyranny until the cops beat up a young Orthodox Jewish man. Only then was a parade organized, with Al Sharpton at the head and the rabbis right behind him.” What young orthodox Jewish man? The only case I know of that resembles Moriarty’s statement is that of Gideon Busch, a deranged man brandishing a hammer, who on August 30, 1999 was shot to death by police, after which Al Sharpton led a protest march. I know of no such “beating.” Is it possible that Moriarty was so lazy and sloppy that he shortchanged his own argument? Besides, following the tragic, February 4, 1999 shooting by four white policemen of illegal Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, leading leftists such as Susan Sarandon, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al. began weeks of daily illegal demonstrations in front of NYPD headquarters, in which over 1700 protesters were arrested. That’s almost seven months before the killing of Gideon Busch. Facts, Mr. Moriarty, facts! And of course, there was no lack of protests following Justin Volpe’s assault on Abner Louima. And I thought black supremacists were bad. At least, they rattle off the names of phony “victims.” How can you debate someone who speaks so vaguely, that you have to guess what the heck he’s talking about? And even when you can piece together what he’s talking about, you realize that he’s botched the entire story. Unlike Michael Moriarty, I wrote my first study on New York crime, race, and policing in 1990. He apparently has yet to begin studying the subject. Moriarty: “Liberal ladies, so enamored of the Mayor, shouted at the police, insulted them. Later, at a Puerto Rican Day parade, the police just let the local Spanish men fondle and “feel up” these so conveniently angry ladies. The cops didn’t lift a finger to help. “Well, they’d gone to Giuliani for a pay raise to be compensated for becoming criminals with badges and lowering the crime rate and Giuliani basically said, “What? And raise the budget? That’s my re-election war chest. You’re just lucky my judges and court kept you out of jail. “Gee, thanks, Mayor Rudy.” I am not aware of any “liberal ladies” who had been “enamored of the Mayor.” Rather, I heard socialist Manhattan women disparage him back in 1994, shortly after he’d been inaugurated, “He’s so ‘prosecutorial.’” The attacks on females at the Puerto Rican Day Parade occurred on June 11, 2000. The police were not standing down out of revenge against the Mayor, but because they had been explicitly ordered to “avoid confrontations with minority males.” Over twenty NYPD officers complained to Daily News reporters, and several complained to New York Post staffers afterwards. The Post quoted one officer as saying, “We were told not to do anything. They don’t want photos of altercations with minorities. It’s very frustrating when we’re told to have our blinders on.” (Whether any policemen complained to writers at the anti-NYPD New York Times, we’ll probably never know. What I do know, is that the Times did not report on any such complaints.) The attacks that day went beyond fondling to manual rape and robbery, and the majority of the attackers were black. But Moriarty screwed up and got one thing right -- though the socialist mainstream media emphasized attacks on Hispanic and black females, from what I could gather, it was mainly white women who were targeted that day. The two out-of-state black females who immediately called a press conference, seeking a $5 million payday, couldn’t be bothered to identify the police officers who supposedly brushed them off, or any of the men who supposedly molested them, and soon disappeared. It was far from clear that the two had even been in the state of New York the day of the parade. What surprised me about the post-wilding newspaper reports was that the officers were getting explicit orders to avoid law-breaking minority males. I had observed NYPD officers doing just that as far back as 1993. The notion that the NYPD was “targeting” minority males was part and parcel of the racial profiling hoax, a Big Lie which in New York was invented partly out of racial revenge for Giuliani’s electoral victory over his black predecessor, partly in order to help Hillary Clinton beat Giuliani in the 2000 Senate race, and partly an extension of a national campaign to handcuff white police officers, and embolden minority criminals. In any event, police were besieged as never before during 1999, which was dominated by the racial profiling hoax. Giuliani ended up dropping out of the Senate race, due to having contracted prostate cancer. Moriarty: “As for Stix’s opinion of Giuliani’s mayoralty: Well, if beating a Haitian, pushing a nightstick up his rectum and then down his throat is ‘pro-illegal alien,’ I’m a bit confused. So there’s the lie to that.” Wow! So, you can refute opponents simply by stringing together non sequiturs, followed by a “So, there.” Moriarty may live in Canada, but that is chutzpah worthy of a New Yorker! Moriarty: “As for his pro-abortion views and desire to keep guns out of the hands of citizens, I have no doubt this little Mussolini is all for it. How Stix could label Giuliani as ‘Mr. Courage’ after his shameless exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy is way beyond me. “It’s a real Latin American appetite that ends up giving the world Mussolinis on both sides of the political aisle: witness Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Congratulations, sir. Your name doesn’t sound the least bit Mediterranean and perhaps that’s the reason why you really don’t know the price for dreaming of Mr. Strongman.” It was David Brooks, not me, who called Giuliani a “courage politician.” I know; people are always confusing me with New York Times columnists. As for saying that Giuliani engaged in the “shameless exploitation” of 911, that is beyond the pale. For all of Giuliani’s faults, which I know much better than Michael Moriarty does, if there is any justice, historians will still be marveling 100 years from now at what Rudy Giuliani did on and in the days immediately after 911. Even if he had previously been a mediocre mayor, the way he led New Yorkers up from the rubble alone would have made him the greatest mayor in New York history. Michael Moriarty is a good actor, but like another TV actor (Martin Sheen) who is marvelous as long as he has a script to read from, he needs to hire a ghost writer, preferably someone who reads more than just headlines, before making any public statements beyond, “Check, please.”

Memo to TCM's Robert Osborne: Dalton Trumbo was a Communist!

By Nicholas Stix On Thursday night, Turner Classic Movies showed the wartime picture, A Guy Named Joe (1943), starring Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunne, and Van Johnson. Tracy plays the ghost of a dead flier who is assigned by his commanding officer, Lionel Barrymore (yeah, even heaven had Army Air Corps squadrons!), to be the guardian angel of Johnson, a hotshot flier. Matters are complicated by the fact that Johnson is falling in love with the girl Spence left behind, spunky, accomplished flier, Irene Dunne, and Spence, though dead, is jealous. (Steven Spielberg remade this in 1989 as Always, which I have not seen. Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, and John Goodman, Always became one of Spielberg’s rare box-office bombs.) TCM’s resident film historian and host, Robert Osborne, said that Joe’s screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, “was accused of being a communist.” Osborne, who never followed up by saying whether the charge was true, suggested that Trumbo was yet another of the legions of victims of “red-baiting.” But the historical record shows that Trumbo was indeed a communist. In fact, he joined the Party in 1943, the same year A Guy Named Joe was released. So, why was Osborne dishonest? The “McCarthyism” myth has always functioned the same way: By saying that legions of creative people were the “victims” of rightwing “paranoia,” and were blacklisted for their leftwing “leanings.” Heck, according to the New York Times, even spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who passed on atom bomb secrets to our Soviet enemies, were “victims” of “hysteria.” Things look a lot different, once one determines that the blacklisted Hollywood Ten were in fact communists, who believed in the armed overthrow of the American government, and in replacing that government with a communist dictatorship, in which people who disagreed with them would not only be blacklisted, but thrown into gulags, tortured, and/or murdered. Beginning on May 8, 1947, under subpoena, some 41 Hollywood figures appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was investigating communist infiltration in Hollywood. HUAC members asked each witness if he was or ever had been a member of the Communist Party, and if he knew the names of other people who were Party members. Thirty-one witnesses cooperated with the committee; ten refused to cooperate. Those ten became known as the Hollywood Ten: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo. The Hollywood Ten were ultimately charged with contempt of Congress and jailed for 6-12 months each. All but Dmytryk were officially blacklisted in Hollywood for years. Most worked under pseudonyms until the early 1960s, when the blacklist ended. Dmytryk came back after serving his sentence, cooperated with the committee, and picked up his career where he had left off. Today, “historians” of “McCarthyism” tell us that those Hollywood figures, such as Elia Kazan, who testified before the HUAC, “were willing to name people who had been members of left-wing groups,” rather than go to prison for contempt of Congress. As the saying goes, a half-truth is a whole lie. HUAC wasn’t interested in “people who had been members of left-wing groups,” it was interested in people who had been members of the Communist Party. At the time, there were many “leftwing groups” that were not openly communist; the majority were Communist fronts, while others were run by socialist anti-communists. Yes, leftwing anti-communists existed at the time; some of them founded the movement that is today known as neoconservatism. We are also frequently told, by leftwing propagandists who do not know the difference between the Senate and the House, that in 1947 Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R, WI) was a member of or the chairman of the HUAC, or somehow working with it. But McCarthy was not a member of the House, had only been sworn into office in January, 1947, and did not begin his crusade until 1950. Such propagandists also do not tell us of the threat of communists and Soviet spies in high places at the time (Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss), or of the threat of war with the Soviet Union. Forty years later, the release of the Venona Tapes showed that the domestic communist threat was indeed as widespread as charged in the “rightwing hysteria.” The cover-up of the truth behind the Hollywood Ten and domestic subversion at the time is so pervasive that the leading web pages cited by google for members of the group compete with each other as to who can censor more of the truth. Under “Herbert Biberman,” for instance, the first of 3,870 entries is that of “Spartacus” a British communist group. (It is named after the Spartacus Group, founded in Wilhelmine Germany by communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.) Spartacus censors the fact that Biberman had been a member of the Communist Party. The anonymous entry for Biberman at Wikipedia, which is reprinted verbatim at answers.com, goes Spartacus one better, in censoring even the reasons why Biberman was subpoenaed by HUAC in the first place. (Wikipedia’s anonymity does its readers no favors.) “Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a Jewish family, he is best known for being one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of MPAA members working in various jobs in the Hollywood film industry who were cited for contempt of Congress during the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. The contempt conviction earned Biberman six months in jail, and he was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses.” Someone who didn’t know the truth would think that Congress had been randomly sending out subpoenas to poor sods, and then throwing them into jail, when they didn’t comply with the subpoenas. The funny thing is, the Hollywood Ten supported tyrannies that did randomly arrest and imprison poor sods! Communists, both those who lived through the period, and their latter-day supporters, paint anti-communists as paranoid and unjust, and the communists as “victims.” But such propagandistic revisionism won’t wash. Depending on the retelling, the Hollywood Ten invoked the First (freedom of opinion and association) or the Fifth (freedom from self-incrimination) Amendment, before the HUAC. Neither strategy makes any legal sense to me. Congress was not criminalizing them for their opinions or for associating with certain groups. And self-incrimination wasn’t at issue, because membership in the Communist Party was not illegal. Thus, no one who testified that he was presently or had been a member of the Communist Party would be incriminating himself. That people who had contempt for the entire Bill of Rights should invoke it is nothing knew; however, it was poetic justice that for once such an attempted abuse failed. The Hollywood Ten refused to testify based not on fear of legal retribution, but based on the orders of the Communist Party itself. In 2002, F.X. Feeney wrote of director Edward Dmytryk,

Dmytryk felt that the Hollywood Ten's first confrontation with Congress (which rapidly deteriorated into a shouting match) might have had a more peaceful outcome--that indeed there might have been less furor and no blacklist--except that the Communist Party, pressuring Dmytryk and the rest of the Ten, wanted the propaganda advantage of a defiant martyrdom. "The Ten had been sacrificed to the Party's purpose," he writes in Odd Man Out. "If I were going to be a martyr, I wanted the privilege of choosing my martyrdom, and making my family suffer to protect American representatives of a foreign agency would certainly not be it."

As Michael Mills wrote in 1998 in “Blacklist: A Different Look at the 1947 HUAC Hearings,”

In his autobiography “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist”, Walter Bernstein, contributing writer for The New Yorker, and former screenwriter, claimed that while he was working at Columbia Pictures, he and Director Robert Rossen, would set out deliberately to include some leftist point of view in a particular scene. They left it up to studio head Harry Cohn to delete the unwanted scenes. Rossen, an overt Communist, was perturbed at his exclusion as one of the original Hollywood Ten! He never got over “being snubbed in such an unsavory manner!” Here, for the first time, one of the key players of the Hollywood left admitted purposefully and deliberately to including pro-Communist messages in movie scripts.

It was a point of “honor” for the Hollywood Ten to follow the orders of the Communist Party, and not denounce fellow communists, so that a totalitarian dictatorship could be imposed on America, in which people would be forced to denounce their friends … or die. (For an immensely readable history of secret police, including the role of denunciation in Russia, Nazi Germany, and other countries, see Robert J. Stove’s The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims.) Initially, a group of Hollywood luminaries, the Committee for the First Amendment, which included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston, supported the Hollywood Ten, but they were so embarrassed by the Ten’s theatrics in the House, that they renounced them. The continuing claims that the Hollywood Ten were “victims” ring false. Only someone who believes in and practices tolerance and “live and let live,” can credibly defend them. Someone who believes in jailing, torturing, and executing dissenters can not honestly complain when one of their number gets subpoenaed. But that’s one of the problems with communists -- they’re compulsive liars! Thus, it is very difficult for leftists to defend the Hollywood Ten without lying and/or obfuscating. In such defenses, they are speaking to comrades and to people who don’t know the score. And since communists and their sympathizers in education, academia, and the media have had so much success over the past forty-plus years misrepresenting the postwar communist threat, the majority of the population doesn’t know the score. And so, the propagandists don’t tell you that the Hollywood Ten were communists. Meanwhile, the defenders of the Hollywood Ten themselves believe in persecuting and blacklisting anyone who disagrees with them. To get an idea of the breadth of the Left’s hypocrisy, since at least the late 1980s, the Leftists who control the media, schools, and higher education, have terrorized and blacklisted colleagues, not for seeking to destroy America, but for seeking to preserve her. Historian Alan Kors and lawyer Harvey Silverglate, the authors of The Shadow University, founded the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in 1999 expressly to fight such persecution in higher education. I have never heard any of those who speak compulsively of “McCarthyism” regarding the 1950s, take a stand against such repression, which, in the case of public institutions, is illegal. (In 1998, this writer was politically blacklisted by York College and Baruch College, both of the City University of New York system.) Instead, they rail against non-existent “rightwing” repression. E.g., last spring, Frank Rich of the New York Times charged that the White House had engaged in repression by saying, a few days after the 911 attacks, that people should watch what they said. Conversely, I have never read Frank Rich take a stand against real political repression in America. An exception to the above rule regarding the Left is Kirk Douglas, who bucked the Hollywood blacklist not only by hiring Dalton Trumbo to script Spartacus (1960), but by giving him screen credit, as opposed to the usual practice of either not hiring a blacklisted writer or having him write using a pseudonym. But then, Kirk Douglas – my favorite lefty -- was always an exception to the rules. Douglas later hired the native Coloradan to script one of the screen’s greatest Westerns, the romantic, wistful, Lonely are the Brave (1962). Lonely … was the story of “Jack Burns” (Douglas), a 19th century cowboy, with a cowboy’s sense of honor, in a mid-20th century world that has no place for him -- a stranger in a strange land. Nothing collectivist there. (Trumbo and Douglas both should have been up for Oscars for Lonely …, but though the picture is now recognized as a classic, it was made on a shoestring, and made little splash at the time.) To get an idea of how much trouble communists were and are, sixty and seventy years ago, leftists who were not communists – e.g., democratic socialists – initially permitted communists to join their organizations. But eventually, they had to throw them out, and bar any communists from joining, because they discovered that the communists only joined organizations, in order to take them over, and turn them into communist fronts. In this regard, I had some experiences of my own. For most of the two years I attended SUNY Stony Brook (1978-80), I was the manager of the vegetarian, student cooperative restaurant, Harkness East. (The founder, Peter Hickman, I believe his name was, had been an undergrad at lefty Antioch College in Ohio, back when the phrase “lefty college” was not redundant. Antioch had a cooperative Harkness dorm, if I recall correctly.) I was briefly friendly with Mitch Cohen, the leader of the communist Red Balloon group. I was only friendly with Mitch briefly because, good communist that he was, he was constantly double-dealing, manipulating, and stabbing people in the back. Once, following some sort of political demonstration we had both attended, Mitch accompanied me to Harkness as my guest. Immediately, he started musing aloud about taking over the place. Fortunately, he decided against trying a power play. He wouldn’t have succeeded, but the already shaky operation might not have survived a power struggle. Indeed, when I left a few months later to attend school in West Germany, Harkness went under. As Michael Mills has observed, it was a leftwing Democrat president, Harry Truman, who required loyalty oaths of government employees. Mills has also argued, that one must distinguish between the 1947 Hollywood Ten, and the blacklisting of over 300 Hollywood figures (some of whom were not communists) that began in 1951, when Joseph McCarthy was at the height of his influence. And yet, consider the testimony, or rather lack thereof, of producer Paul Jarrico, as recounted by Mills. Asked by the committee, “In the event of a war between Russian and America, would you support the United States?,” Jarrico remained silent. His silence wasn’t out of reverence for the Bill of Rights, but out of allegiance to the Soviet Union. People speak of rightwing “hysteria,” but the truth of the matter is that during the twelve years of FDR’s reign, communists had taken an ever stronger foothold at the highest levels of American life. FDR is once supposed to have responded to criticism of communists by saying, “Some of my best friends are communists.” And as Lowell Ponte has noted, Roosevelt’s “New Deal government, as liberal journalist Carl Bernstein of Woodword [sic] & Bernstein fame acknowledged in his autobiographical book Loyalties, was overflowing with thousands of Communist Party members, including Bernstein's parents.” And the American people were fed up. If rightwing hysteria was a problem, it was in response to years of leftwing hysteria, subversion, and intrigue. And today, things are 1000 times worse in academia, the schools, and the media, than they were in 1947. The best argument against the work of the HUAC isn’t that it violated the law or “victimized” people who were themselves seeking to destroy America, but that it encouraged a culture of denunciation, the same sort of culture that the communists and the Nazis had brought about in the nations they tyrannized. And if you don’t like the blacklist, don’t get mad at the House of the Senate. The blacklist was entirely the creation of the Hollywood studios. And it was supported by the vast majority of the American people. Dalton Trumbo was a communist, but he was a great writer and some kind of propagandist. He was so gifted, that he could sing hymns on behalf of the Western capitalist democracies he despised. In A Guy Called Joe, Lionel Barrymore tells Spencer Tracy, that the guardian angels’ job is to protect the fliers, who are fighting for a man’s right to be free.

Folly in Gaza

By Nicholas Stix And so now the Israeli government has dragged Jews from their homes in Gaza, homes that the same government had encouraged them to build, but to what end? To please George W. Bush? Surely, not to bring peace to Israel. For every territorial concession the Sharon government makes, just brings total war a little closer. One does not need to cite Scripture to defend Israel’s keeping the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, only the traditional laws of war and realpolitik. Since time immemorial, to the victor have gone the spoils, including land. Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, had all massed on Israel’s borders in 1967, in their third attempt to annihilate the Jewish state, and drive the Jews into the sea. In 1948, the Jews of Israel had prevailed, and again in 1956. This time, Israel’s victory was the most spectacular of all. In six days, she crushed the Arab armies, and seized land in the Sinai from Egypt; the Golan Heights from Syria; and East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank from Jordan. At that point, there were no "Palestinians." But all of a sudden, the Arabs who had had no problem being ruled by the Jordanians became “Palestinians,” an "imagi-nation." Anti-Semites the world over, repeated the term “occupation,” until others followed suit. If the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are “Occupied Territories,” then Americans live in Occupied Texas and Occupied Baja California, and Poles live in Occupied East Prussia. But when Arabs and their anti-Semitic supporters speak of “Occupied Palestine,” they do not mean the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; they mean all of Israel. In their textbooks, all of Israel is identified as “Palestine.” They wear jewelry in the shape of Israel, which they also refer to as “Palestine.” The reason the Arabs in the Gaza Strip and on the West bank became a “nation,” was because Moslem Arabs have no problem accepting the most oppressive Arab government, but they would and regularly do commit suicide, before accepting the rule of Jews … or of democracy, for that matter. In 1978, Israel, ever hungry for peace, let Jimmy Carter push it into giving up the oil-rich Sinai, the only land with oil that it had ever possessed. To what end? So that Egypt, which could not beat her militarily, could turn a military defeat into a diplomatic victory? Fool that I was, I supported Carter’s mischief at the time. I even had the only political dream of my life (that I can recall). Three elephants were floating in the air, the tail of one linked to the trunk of the one behind it. One elephant was the U.S., one was Egypt, and one was Israel. It was the fall of 1978. I had just transferred to SUNY Stony Brook, and lived off campus with a couple of Jewish psycho cases. The posted index card for the house they wished to share, identified them as “a couple of Zionist students.” That meant they were psychos, because at Stony Brook, unless someone stated otherwise, it was taken for granted that he -- whether Jew or Gentile -- supported Israel. For someone to underscore such support, meant he was from the lunatic, JDL (Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense league) fringe. Stew was from Chicago, and Joseph, who called himself “Jake,” was from Brooklyn. When Jake picked me up at the railroad station to show me the house, he grilled me. “Are you a Zionist?” Well, I said, nervously, I support the existence of the state of Israel. “You’re a Zionist.” But once, when the evening news was discussing the Carter “peace” talks, I mentioned, by the way, “I think the Palestinians ought to have a homeland of their own.” Jake’s face instantly revealed homicidal rage. Well, things were pretty intolerable after that, and Jake told me I’d have to move out at the end of the semester. He or Stew even stole some of my property. As time went on, I learned that the Arabs had no intention of making peace with the Jews of Israel, but intended only to subject them to the death of a thousand cuts, to take concession after concession, until the Jews were too weak to successfully defend themselves. So, now I’m a “psycho,” too. And now, Ariel Sharon is ultimately rewarding the Arab terrorists in the territories. And to what end? Sharon may seek peace, but his give-back will only strengthen the hand of, and inspire those whose life goal is to annihilate the Jews of Israel. Which is to say, all those Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians.” Tonight on Nightline, John Donvan, who I usually find honest and decent, did a propaganda piece on behalf of the Arabs, from the Gaza Strip. Donvan “contrasted” those Arabs who were “political,” who celebrated with machine guns, military fatigues, masks and “Palestinian” flags in the streets of Gaza City, and “those who don’t give a damn about politics,” at the beach. And yet, the images gave the lie to Donvan’s words. In the water, boats cruised by, adorned exclusively with big, “Palestinian” flags. On the beach, stood more such flags. Donvan spoke fondly of nationalist Arab colleagues at Nightline. I’m not sure I saw a single Arab “who [didn’t] give a damn about politics” in the entire segment. Donvan interviewed an armed “militant” (read: terrorist) in fatigues in Gaza City, who insisted that the “resistance” (read: terrorism) “put pressure” on the Israelis to leave Gaza. Then he interviewed a “moderate” Arab political commentator, who said the Israelis were “not ready to talk about Jerusalem, about refugees …” To talk about “Jerusalem” and “refugees”? Those are the same maximalist demands of those who openly seek the destruction of Israel. They demand that the Jews share Jerusalem with the Arabs, and that the Jews give the Arabs control of the old city, with the Jewish shrines that the Arabs under Jordanian rule used as latrines, and which they have more recently defiled. These are the same Arabs who attack Jews who seek to pray at Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount. “The refugees” is shorthand for “the right of return,” the demand that every Arab claiming to have lived in Israel before the 1948 war, or to be a descendant of such an Arab, be permitted to emigrate to Israel, be granted citizenship, and take over Israel from within, via a combination of bombs and ballots, and kill off or drive off all of the Jews of Israel. Thus, the difference between an Arab “militant” and an Arab “moderate” is that one wears military fatigues, while the other wears a well-tailored business suit. As Mark Steyn once observed, when he asked a prominent “moderate” Moslem if, 500 years after the Moslem Moors had been driven out of Spain, he would recognize the current Spanish government, the “moderate” Moslem said, of course not. Twenty-three years ago, almost to the day, an American politician -- perhaps the last -- displayed decency and common sense on this issue. "In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely ten miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel's population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies." The speaker added, "I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again." That was on September 1, 1982. The speaker, addressing America, was President Ronald Reagan. Moslem Arabs will wish to live in peace with the Jews of Israel, when linked elephants float up in the sky.

Diva-Victim Forgives Polanski, Condemns Journalist

By Nicholas Stix People who send me nasty letters are often guided by sympathy for the devil, from a place where, in Mick Jagger’s immortal words, “every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints.” I’ll write a story on a Hip-Hopper who openly supports al Qaeda, or on “pacifists” allied with terrorists, on black racism, or on crime, and in come the death threats, the people telling me I’m the source of all the world’s woes, and the attempts to gag me through the threat of frivolous lawsuits. The attitude of such correspondents is, if I tell the truth, I’m a liar, but if I’ll lie for their side, then I’m a good guy. And so it is, with the Roman Polanski case. In a recent column, I wrote on rapist-pedophile-fugitive Roman Polanski’s successful perversion – with the help of some incompetent British jurists -- of the English legal system. The following letter came on Sunday evening. Mr Stix, Thank you for your assassination of Roman Polanski. I really believe, as he has stated ,that this libel lawsuit was about the defamation of the late Sharon Tate Polanskis' Yes Roman Polanski had an affair with an underage young girl..who has gone on record as saying she does not hold anything against him. He apparently has a sexual addiction..Sharon knew this and according to reliable sources was on the verge of divorcing him when she was horribly murdered. Her problem being as she has been quoted " He's my Roman and I love him." The model in question has gone on record to say " That's not how I remember it." She claims he just stared at her as if she reminded him of Sharon. When the suppose victim will not testify against him how smart are the lawyers? Because of his fame and fortune he has made a lot of money, possibly received favors. In consideration of the horrible things that has happened to the poor man I can almost understand.....or if the (girl) now woman felt justice needed to be served...Having grown up during Nazi Germany, having his wife, child and friends horrendously murdered could negatively effect probably anyone.... I feel sure he does not enjoy knowing he is a fugitive, but with the unpleasant things that have happened to him for seemingly no reason ..I doubt he feels he would get a fair trial...or simply has'nt the man suffered enough? Robert Robert First of all, “Robert” can’t even be honest about the publicly known basic fact of the matter: Roman Polanski did not “[have] an affair with an underage young girl.” He raped a 13-year-old girl. For all of his victim’s bizarre statements about Polanski, she has never said she had an “affair” with him. She has clearly stated that he forced himself on her, against her will and in spite of her telling him to stop. (Under the influence of the drugs and alcohol Polanski had pumped his victim full of, as part of his plan, she was unable to do more.) Besides, according to California state law then and now, a grown man cannot have a sexual affair with a 13-year-old girl, even if the child did consent. It would still be rape. No, not “statutory” rape, but first-degree rape. The law does not recognize 13-year-olds as being old enough to give informed consent. But note that Robert did not complain about my treatment of Polanski’s victim. It is Polanski whom I “assassinated.” Let’s see. John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abe Lincoln. Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy. James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. And Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. But I never killed Roman Polanski, who is very much alive. Besides, even if someone did kill him, it wouldn’t count as an “assassination.” Who is Roman Polanski, but a wealthy, narcissistic felon and fugitive from justice? Killing him would at worst constitute murder, and at best be a public service. And I didn’t commit “character assassination” against him, because he has no character, no good name to soil. So, since Polanski is a Holocaust survivor and his supposedly fed-up wife wife was murdered, he gets a get-out-of-free card on rape, sodomy, and five other felony raps, including now flight from prosecution. So, if I can come up with a fashionably oppressive life story, can I get away with murder, rape, and mayhem, too? What’s that, Robert? Polanski is an artist, and you just can’t expect artists to follow the rules of society. Hitler was an artist, too. For characters like this Robert guy, the rules are for “the little people”; they just don’t apply to the Roman Polanskis of the world. The proper term for a Robert is unacceptable in a family-friendly blog; it refers to someone who is obsessed with having relations with celebrities. Mick Jagger wrote a song using it as the title. Then, late this (Tuesday) afternoon, I received the following e-mail, from an eddress that contained the name of Samantha Geimer, the girl (in the meantime, a pretty, 40-year-old mother of three sons) whom Roman Polanski raped 27 years ago.

It should be a crime for you to make a living re-victimizing me with your stupid story. You and your fellow reporters are no better than Polanski. I wish you would all get sued for every lie your print. Sincerly, Samantha

What to do or say? I hadn’t outed the woman; she did that herself. In fact, the “rule” against publishing the name of a female rape victim is not based on any legal or ethical principle. (Ms. Geimer’s case is different, because she was a child at the time, but that matter became moot, when she went public.) Feminists demanded and got it from wimpy male editors (you know, those patriarchal, “male chauvinist pigs” the feminists were always complaining about?) based on the principles of female vulnerability and female exceptionalism. (The practice of permitting grown females to charge men with rape in a court of law, while hiding their own identities, has wreaked havoc with the Anglo-American legal tradition.) I just sent Samantha Geimer the following letter. Dear Ms. Geimer, (I am assuming that you are Ms. Geimer, and not a prankster.) I did not reveal your name; you did. Had you refrained from identifying yourself, I would have done likewise, even though I would not have been under any obligation to do so. You cannot publicly identify yourself, and then claim that I "re-victimized" you. That is moral hypocrisy. It is your prerogative to forgive Polanski, but to forgive him, while spewing venom at me, shows that you don't know right from wrong. It is essential that one condemn and seek to punish wrongdoers both for the primary reason of seeking justice, which is an end in itself, but also for the secondary reason that humans by nature and victims of outrages in particular feel a certain degree of … call it wrath, rage, aggression or what have you. If people do not turn that wrath on those who have earned it, they will turn it, as you have, on those who have not. I cannot be sued, because, as you well know, I did not print a single lie. The truth, as the legal adage goes, is an absolute defense. I just googled quickly under your name, and see that you have given interviews on camera to some of the world’s most pathetic excuses for "journalists." Inside Edition? Larry King! For cryin' out loud! Why not the Globe and the Weekly World News, while you were at it? I'll never for the life of me understand why people react the most abusively to stories that are true and proper, all the way down the line. Ms. Geimer, I'm happy for you that you've managed to have a wonderful life, in spite of what Roman Polanski did to you. But let’s get this straight: It was Roman Polanski that victimized you, not me. I didn't rape you, I didn't camp out by your house, and I didn't even tell people where you lived. But now I have no choice but to link to material about you, where you told the whole world where you lived, and showed it what you looked like, in order that I may prove to my readers that at least one of us is dealing off the top of the deck. You do not get a line-item veto on publicity. And you don't get to be irrationally nice to big, crappy media organs, and then kick real journalists in the teeth, without getting your nastiness publicly thrown back in your face. I realize that Hollywood divas get to pull that crap with reporters all the time, because the reporters are themselves sycophants who have no self-respect, but I'm not an entertainment sycophant. I guess you can take the girl out of Hollywood, but you can't take the Hollywood out of the girl. Sincerely, Nicholas Stix

McMansions, Real Estate Wars, and Media Tricks

By Nicholas Stix In suburbia, the thrill is back, as a “prairie war” is being waged across the country over the size of houses. A Fox News report tonight covered the war in Los Angeles over “McMansions” aka “mansionization,” houses that are “super-sized,” extended outwards and upwards or built new on small lots as replacements for homes a fraction their size. The homes, also called “starter castles,” are two to three times the size of the homes that previously stood on the same lots, and are so large that neighbors in normal-sized homes claim that the stuffed houses on steroids cut off all of the sunlight to their backyards, and wipe out their privacy. Whereas homes in the neighborhoods in question typically take up less than 40% of a lot (leaving the rest of the acreage to front and back yards), these homes take up the vast majority (in some cases, virtually all) of the lots they are built on, and are built higher than traditional area homes for the lots in question. Across the country, cities have changed zoning ordinances, limiting the height of new houses, and forbidding the building of homes taking up more than a certain percentage of a lot, while many cities are now debating enacting such changes. In Los Angeles, a movement seeks to change zoning ordinances to forbid residential builders from building new homes or expanding existing homes to take up more than 40% of a given lot. During tonight’s story, Fox News (I don’t know who the reporter was, and the FNC site had no link) ran an interview with “L.A. resident” Laura Riddle, who said the issue was adequate “housing” and that the “1950s” homes on so many of the lots were inadequate to today’s housing needs. Something smelled rotten. First of all, the woman was talking blatant nonsense. Families were on average much larger during the 1950s – they didn’t call it the “baby boom” for nothing. Second, the woman talked like a flack spewing rehearsed talking points. Idiotic talking points, granted, but talking points nonetheless. Mere “residents” rarely sound that polished. And so I googled under “Laura Riddle” and “real estate,” and sure enough, she’s a realtor! She works for Century 21. Riddle may live in L.A., but so do many realtors. But for FNC to identify Riddle merely as a “resident” was dishonest, and robbed viewers of the ability to weigh her possible motivations. Kerry Cavanaugh of the L.A. Daily News got it right in a July 26 story, in identifying Riddle as a “Realtor and area resident.”

But Realtor and area resident Laura Riddle said the proposed ordinance would force homeowners like herself out of the area. Riddle's elderly mother is moving in with her and she couldn't find a house in the neighborhood big enough to accommodate her growing family.

“There's a whole NIMBY trend. If you don't like that house and think it's ugly, don't buy that house. It comes down to homeowners' rights.”

Cavanaugh’s story, by the way, has been picked up by different outlets all over the country. Riddle was also ridiculous in her statement to Cavanaugh. How large a house do you need to make room for one elderly woman? Is Riddle’s mother the Imelda Marcos of L.A.? Riddle appears to be in her forties; how large could her “growing family” be? And using her elderly mother as a front for making a killing in the real estate market is really slimy. Riddle’s statements were also irrelevant to the non-McMansion homeowners’ beef. They have no intention of buying the super-sized homes; as Riddle has to know, they wish to keep their present homes, without their neighbors’ McMansions diminishing their quality of life or their property's value. And Riddle’s opponents would say that it does indeed “come down to homeowners’ rights.” No one in either of the stories talked about it, but if a super-sized house will rob the adjacent home of sunlight and privacy to the degree that opponents claim it will, it may also reduce that home’s value by tens of thousands of dollars now, and hundreds of thousands a few years down the road. Somehow, I doubt that the owners of the houses on steroids would be at all happy, if their immediate neighbors returned fire by expanding their own homes or replacing them with equally Canseco-like structures. Note too that -- to steal a line from Steve Sailer -- if people like Riddle become the Typhoid Marys of overbuilt lots, many middle/upper-middle class suburban neighborhoods will end up looking like a cross between urban, apartment building-dominated neighborhoods and cramped, ugly, working-class neighborhoods in which small houses are jammed next to each other, on tiny lots. The bottom line is, that Laura Riddle hopes to make a killing selling “McMansions.” Readers of Cavanaugh’s article will have seen her statement, noted her profession and vested interest in promoting structures on steroids, and taken her words with a chuckle and a grain of salt. It is no coincidence that Riddle was quoted both by Fox News and the L.A. Daily News. Either she reached out to a reporter in a given story or the reporter reached out to her. (Since she was quoted first by Kerry Cavanaugh, my hunch is that the Fox News reporter googled under “McMansion,” saw Riddle’s name in the second story listed -- which had the catchiest title, “McMansion Invasion” -- and called her up.) That in itself is perfectly ethical, regardless of who contacted whom first. Riddle has a right to promote herself, in her silly, disingenuous way, and reporters need representative talking points. But it is unethical for a reporter to present a speaker with a clear vested interest, without identifying that interest. Note that the Fox News story was balanced, in presenting residents who oppose the McMansions, and thus support changing zoning ordinances. For a similar case from the other side of the country and the other side of the political aisle, last year Sade Baderinwa of New York’s WABC Eyewitness News covered a city hearing on rent stabilization, and interviewed “resident” Mike McKean, who opposed letting residential property owners raise rents. While it is true that Mike McKean is a New York City resident, just as Laura Riddle is a Los Angeles resident, the reason McKean was at the hearing was because he has been a housing activist for over 20 years! Not a lot of people typically attend such hearings. I know; I attended one twenty years ago. I know of McKean’s history, because I met him in late summer or early fall, 1985, at the office he shared with another housing activist I knew. Heck, McKean was probably at the same hearing I attended. (Manny Mirabella was then the flack for the apartment house owners.) He’s been attending such hearings for over twenty years. The basic position of activists like McKean is that apartment rents in Manhattan should remain at the World War II level … forever. And so, Sade Baderinwa misled viewers by misrepresenting McKean as a “resident,” instead of as a “tenant activist.” That made me wonder if Baderinwa wasn’t showing underhanded support for McKean’s political position. Otherwise, she blew the story. To paraphrase veteran Chicago newspaperman, media critic, and author of Priests at Work, Jim Bowman (today’s first item), with Baderinwa and the Fox News reporter (or his producer), you’ve got the Hobson’s choice of whether you want to look dumb or be dumb. (Full disclosure: Jim is a friend; I don’t want to be accused of misleading my readers!) You’d be surprised just how often journalists quote people who are either interested parties or personal friends in stories, as if they just happened by. I know some New York political operatives who get quoted all the time by their journalist buddies, without the journalists ever mentioning the connection. I even once was interviewed by a New York Times reporter, long ago, through one of the operatives. However, the reporter told me he couldn’t use my experience, because it didn’t fit into his angle. It is almost impossible to know if someone quoted in a story is a reporter’s personal friend, but one can occasionally take down and google the name of a vaguely identified interview subject, to try and see if the reporter is playing by the rules.

Cameron, Beltran, in Violent Collision in Mets Game; Psychic MLB.com Report

By Nicholas Stix 10:22 p.m. ET Mets outfielders Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran were involved in a horrific collision during the Mets game against the San Diego Padres in San Diego. The collision, the worst ever seen by this reporter during a baseball game, occurred at app. 8:50 p.m., during the bottom of the eighth inning of a 1-1 game at Petco Park. Cameron, playing right field, and Beltran playing center, were both chasing a sinking liner in right-center field off the bat of Padres pinch-hitter David Ross. Mets announcer Ralph Kiner said that in such situations, the centerfielder gets the ball. Fellow Mets announcer Ted Robinson observed, “Problem there – two centerfielders.” Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran are both gold glove-winning center fielders. When the Mets signed Beltran, the prize of the free agent market during the offseason, Cameron graciously moved to right field. However, he retained the instincts of a center fielder. When the collision occurred, both men were leaning towards the ground, focused on the ball, and running hard with their feet planted. Beltran’s head slammed into the middle or side of Cameron’s face. Beltran immediately bounced up off the ground, while Cameron remained motionless in a prone position. David Ross made it to third base, from where he scored the go-ahead and eventual winning run on a single by Met-killer Joey Randa. Mets trainer Ray Ramirez ran to the stricken players, immediately motioning to the dugout by patting his own head, and circling his index finger, letting it be known that he needed an ambulance, and getting Beltran to sit down. The Mets announcers claimed that they saw movement from Cameron’s body. The collision was so horrible, that after the game’s technical crew had replayed it twice, Mets announcer Ted Robinson said “That’s enough,” to let the crew know to stop replaying the accident, though the collision was replayed one more time after the game. Adding insult to injury, in the top of the eighth inning, just 30 minutes after the collision, Mets left fielder and season MVP so far, Cliff Floyd, was hit right on the left knee cap by a pitch from Padres reliever Akinori Otsuka. Floyd remained on the deck in agony for more than a minute, and walked slowly to first base, obviously in great pain, but remained in the game. Carlos Beltran walked off the field on his own power, while Mike Cameron was taken to the hospital strapped to a gurney. According to a report dated “8:04 p.m. ET” by Marty Noble at mlb.com, “A CT scan on Cameron at San Diego's Mercy Hospital after the game revealed multiple fractures of both cheekbones and a broken nose. Cameron was placed on the 15-day disabled list and Victor Diaz was recalled from Triple-A Norfolk to take his place on the roster. “Beltran eventually walked off the field under his own power, but he was removed from the game as well. Beltran is scheduled to have a CT scan at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif.” The problem with Noble’s report, however, was that the game was not yet over, and the time given for it was 46 minutes before the accident had even occurred. In fact, this reporter saw Noble’s report already up just after 9:30 p.m., as the eighth inning was coming to a close. Marty Noble is a good sports writer, but is he a psychic? If so, why didn’t he know that the Padres won the game, 2-1? At 9:37 p.m., Mets announcer Ted Robinson reported that Mike Cameron was “Conscious, talking, and alert. No further word given on his injuries.” The game ended at 9:42 p.m. on a popup to left field by Mets backup catcher Ramon Castro. At 9:48 p.m., Mets Vice President Jim Duquette spoke on camera, saying of Beltran’s, “he’s surprisingly alert and doing well, surprisingly well, considering the collision that he had. He’s got a little pain in his shoulder, the front part of his shoulder, and he has a cut on the left side of his face, but other than that, he’s doing remarkably well …” “And we heard from the trainer, Mike Cameron’s on his way to the hospital as you mentioned, and he was alert and moving, which is all a good sign, we don’t have a lot of other information regarding him, but it was good news to know that he was doing fine and alert and conscious.” Perhaps Duquette should call Marty Noble, who seems to have information even before Cameron’s doctors. Though the Mets have not yet said anything on the subject, Carlos Beltran could be out for at least one week, and Mike Cameron could be finished for the season.

Harry Belafonte, Historian

By Nicholas Stix During an interview with reporter Marc Morano of the Cybercast News Service that was published on Monday, singer-actor Harry Belafonte said,

“[If] a black is a tyrant, he is first and foremost a tyrant, then he incidentally is black. Bush is a tyrant and if he gathers around him black tyrants, they all have to be treated as they are being treated.

“When asked specifically who was a ‘black tyrant’ in the Bush administration, Belafonte responded to this reporter, ‘You.’ When this reporter noted that he was a Caucasian and attempted to ask another question, Belafonte abruptly ended the interview by saying, ‘That's it.’”

After Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte is as great a singer as I’ve ever heard. Only Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee compare to him. While most famous for his hugely popular West Indian folk-style pop songs, “Banana Boat” (aka “Day-O,” which he co-wrote) and ”Jamaica Farewell,” his greatness and versatility are perhaps best displayed in tender, crossover recordings of such songs as “Scarlet Ribbons” and “Try to Remember.” Belafonte also starred in or was a featured player in some excellent movies (I can’t recall how good an actor he was), and was a Tony award-winning musical performer on Broadway. But the 78-year-old Belafonte’s acting days are over, and his pipes are shot. And so, he has embarked upon a new career, as an historian. There are a few problems with what Harry Belafonte said. First, there were no Jews in the Nazi hierarchy. Period. The only way a Jew could survive in Nazi Germany, was by passing himself off as a Christian, as did Salomon Perel, whose life was depicted by director Agnieszka Holland and actor Marco Hofschneider, in the 1990 movie, Europa, Europa. Otherwise, they were headed for the death camps. Second, since the Nazis were devoted to the extermination of “das europaeische Judentum” (European Jewry), Belafonte is insinuating that the GOP is dedicated to the extermination of American blacks. Does he really want people to conclude that he’s a moron? The historical record shows that it is the Democrat Party, his party, that was the party of slavery and Jim Crow. The Republican Party was founded in part to abolish slavery. The third problem regards Belafonte’s condemnation of black Republican cabinet members as “black tyrants.” The statement argues that present and past black Bush cabinet members Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Rod Paige and Alphonso Jackson are monsters. After all, my 1992 New Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus defines “tyrant” as “an oppressive or cruel ruler or master, a despot [,] someone behaving like a despot [,] (Gk. hist.) an arbitrary and absolute ruler who took power by force [O.F. fr. L. fr. Gk],” and Belafonte certainly said “black tyrant,” as if he did not like Rice, et al. (Note that in 2002, Belafonte called then-Secretary of State Colin Powell a “house slave.” How can one be a “tyrant” and a “house slave”? Belafonte is a Marxist; in Marxism, everything is “dialectical,” as in “Heads I win, tails you lose.” Marxists are permitted to contradict themselves with impunity, while the rest of us must maintain consistency. Similarly, Marxists may rob, torture, and murder, while everyone else must behave like a saint, and yet must still endure Marxists’ vituperation. Got it?) And yet, Harry Belafonte is a communist, and one of the world’s most famous supporters and friends of murderous Cuban communist dictator, Fidel Castro. Castro has murdered thousands of Cubans, and imprisoned tens of thousands more, simply for disagreeing with him. Castro “took power by force” and is “an oppressive or cruel ruler or master, a despot.” When considering Belafonte’s statement, one must keep in mind that as with other totalitarian beliefs (Nazism, Islam), being a communist requires that one constantly lie. Thus, the lies asserting that Jews were represented in the Nazi hierarchy, and insinuating that the GOP seeks to annihilate blacks. One must also keep in mind that as a communist and a Castro supporter, Harry Belafonte loves nothing more than a good, murderous tyrant. Harry’s not one of those wimpy ex-communists that deserted the Party, when its genocide was revealed. No, Sir! Like my late, communist Uncle Frank from Trinidad, Harry Belafonte respects a real dictator who will do “what has to be done.” And so one must wonder whether, coming from his mouth, the term “tyrants” was meant as a criticism or as a compliment. The occasion of Belafonte’s outburst was a march in Atlanta in support of "extending and strengthening" the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act was one of those virtuous sounding pieces of federal legislation that was supposed to ensure that blacks could exercise the franchise, but was later perverted to impose racism, in the form of guaranteeing “minority control” of certain congressional districts. It would be more honest to simply abolish elections in such districts, and appoint “the people’s representatives.” Which would suit Harry Belafonte just fine. In spouting his idiotic political statements, and seeking to exploit the goodwill millions of people feel toward him due to his musical career, all Belafonte ultimately will do is turn off those who are not communists, socialists, or black racists, while having no effect whatsoever on his comrades. Does Belafonte really want that? Does he want most people to think of him, as they do Paul Robeson, first and foremost as a communist sock puppet, and only secondarily as a performer? Because if he does, he will lose both as a performer and as a politician.