Roger L. Simon

Whoever said Hollywood doesn’t reflect the world? Our globe has gone berserk and Hollywood along with it. Witnesseth: Mel Gibson, one of our country’s most whacko anti-Semites, is planning to make a movie based on the Maccabees (the Hanukah story) from a script by Joe Eszterhas. Reparations, anyone?

Meanwhile, Sean Stone, 24-year old sprout of Oliver, is off to Tehran making a movie in support of the mad mullahs. (Well, the latter isn’t so unexpected – if you believe the old saw about the apple not falling far from the tree.)

This confluence of events was irresistible to Lionel and me for the new Poliwood which you can view HERE.

By the way, Lionel thinks Gibson will never make the film. I disagree. Gibson’s pockets are deep. He can do anything he wants. And action-adventure like the Maccabees is right in his Braveheart sweet spot. And whatever you think of Mel’s bizarre religious views, he can direct.

Watch the POLIWOOD and see what you think.

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Is Columbia University suffering from a collective case of the Stockholm Syndrome?

It would seem so. After having once hosted Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they are doing so again — and this time they are giving the misogynistic, homophobic, Holocaust denying, religious fanatic a banquet! The progressive intellectuals of Morningside Heights evidently have a special place in their hearts for state sponsors of terrorism who murder and torture their own citizens with impunity.

The victims of that terror of course do not. Fortunately, Shurat HaDin — the Israel Law Center that has led several successful lawsuits by victims against perpetrators of terror and their enablers — has again risen to the victim’s defense by issuing a warning to Columbia’s president. From the Center’s press release:

Jewish civil rights group Shurat HaDin — Israel Law Center — has sent a warning letter to Columbia University President Lee Bollinger advising him that Columbia’s plan to host a banquet for visiting Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad runs afoul of U.S. anti-terror laws and will subject the university and its officials to both criminal prosecution and civil liability to victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in Israel or elsewhere. The letter explains that Iran has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by the United States (22 U.S.C 2656f) and that the provision of any support by U.S. persons, including the planned banquet for Ahmadinejad, is considered unlawful provision of aid to the outlawed regime. The Law Center stated that victims of Iranian terrorism will file civil actions and hold Columbia liable for their injuries.

From the letter signed by New York attorney Robert Tolchin and Shurat HaDin director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner:

Hosting Ahmadinejad at a banquet is not merely morally repulsive: it is illegal and likely to render Columbia University and its officers both criminally and civilly liable. Iran is official designated under U.S. law as a state sponsor of terrorism, as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and as a perpetrator of human rights abuses. Ahmadinejad is Iran’s chief executive and personally directs Iran’s terrorist and nuclear proliferation activities and human rights abuse ….

While for Columbia University and certain of its officers hosting Ahmadinejad at a banquet might appear to be nothing more than a harmless Radical Chic parlor game such conduct is in fact very serious business that can and will have severe, real-world criminal and civil consequences for Columbia and its officers.

Ahmadinejad will be in New York next week to address the UN General Assembly for Durban III — the so-called “World Conference Against Racism.” The parentheses are deliberate, since the international body’s Durban I and II conferences were actually fiestas of racism — featuring virtual non-stop anti-Semitism and demonization of Israel.

As some may recall, PJTV attended Durban II in Geneva when many European leaders walked out on Ahmadinejad’s speech. We made some videos of the dramatic events with Jon Voight, Alan Dershowitz, and others.

We will be there for Durban III as well. We will be streaming Anne Bayefsky’s counter-conference on Thursday, September 22, with such luminaries as Voight, Dershowitz, Eli Wiesel and former NY Mayor Ed Koch. The stream begins at 9AM Eastern. Please tune in at PJTV.com.

Regarding the Shurat HaDin letter to Columbia President Bollinger, it can be found here.

Also read: Khamenei Must Go (and Take Ahmadinejad too, Please)

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They say it ain’t over ’til it’s over or the fat lady sings at least a dozen times, finally making all the high notes in Aida and La Traviata in succession. Nevertheless — after only his second debate — things do look pretty good for Rick Perry.

And consider before this Tampa debate he was already twelve points ahead of nearest rival Mitt Romney, according to its sponsor’s (CNN) own poll.

So it’s no surprise that most of Monday’s affair — which mostly reprised the same questions from last week’s Reagan Library debate (this all could get pretty tedious fast) — was a game of “Everybody on Rick” with the Texas governor, perhaps in deference to his state’s proximity to Mexico, as the designated piñata.

Well, not quite everybody. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain declined to attack Perry. (I will try to explain that later.) But Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and, of course, Romney did their best to slam Perry at every opportunity, sometimes remembering, seemingly as an afterthought, to throw in an unkind word for Barack Obama, as if the Texas governor and the not the president was the incumbent.

The five, however, did their Perry dissing in different ways. The first three — Huntsman, Bachmann and Santorum — I would classify as the soreheads. They are all doing miserably in the polls. Huntsman and Santorum always were. They are both currently at 2%, tied with a generic “Someone else” and 2 points behind “None/No one.” (No surprise here with Santorum who, when last facing the electorate, lost reelection in his home state of Pennsylvania by 18 points.) Who, besides their wives, really knows why they are running?

Bachmann, too, once flying high, has herself sunk to a mere 4% (tied with “None/No one”) since Perry entered the race. No wonder she’s sore at the Texan. She took after him, as did Santorum, during the Monday debate because some years ago Perry evidently tried by fiat to have high school girls vaccinated against cancer of the cervix. Perry admitted this approach was a mistake and this whole thing had apparently been rehashed ad infinitum by Kay Bailey Hutchison in her recent, ill-fated run against Perry for the Texas gubernatorial nomination, but never mind. To Bachmann and Santorum this attempt to prevent cancer, whether ill-founded or not, was a form of child molestation or something. The more they went on about this, the more rabid, and frankly scary, they sounded.

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Frank Luntz looked flummoxed.

We were standing in the spin room after Wednesday night’s GOP presidential contretemps and I had just asked him who he thought had won the debate. I had no idea myself and figured he would have a better idea from the polling he conducts on his Fox show minutes after these events. This time he hadn’t and was as puzzled as I was about how the public was taking Rick Perry’s rhetoric — specifically the Texas governor’s use of the “P-word” (for Ponzi scheme) to describe Social Security.

It wasn’t important that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. It was important that Perry had used such a bold, even brazen, term for something so sacrosanct that Al Gore, as the world well recalls, once put it in a “lock box.” (Did it ever get out?)

Anyway, before coming to Luntz for help, I had just gotten through listening to a group of mainstream media yobs from Politico and such places grill Perry’s chief of staff/eminence grise Dave Carney about whether he thought his candidate had made a fatal mistake — or at least lost the debate — by employing the “P-word.”

Carney held firm — what is social security if not a Ponzi scheme — and I began to think: what suckers. He had all these fourth estaters jumping up and down, practically foaming at the mouth, trying to get an answer on something so tangential to the real question (what to do about Social Security) that you just had to laugh. It was obvious where the ink was going to be spilled tomorrow morning.

Yet, still I wondered what the public would think. I suppose I’ll find out when Luntz finally has his show on Thursday night.

Until then, I’ll just reflect on the spectacle. The debate itself was like a mildly amusing episode of an ongoing reality show with Ron Paul in the role of cranky uncle and Rick Santorum playing the unwelcome relative who’s still camped out in your living room six weeks after Christmas. Speaking of Paul, the least surprising moment was when I drove up to the Reagan Library at 2PM to find a half dozen of his supporters standing on the corner waving picket signs in the scorching 110 degree Simi Valley sun. (I guess it’s mad dogs, Englishmen, and Ron Paul supporters.)

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Since I grew up after World War II, September 11, 2001, was — as it was for many of us — by far the most cataclysmic public event of my life. I may have experienced it staring at a television screen in my Los Angeles bedroom, but watching those planes fly into the Twin Towers like a time bomb from the Middle Ages changed my world view, even altered many of my relationships, forever.

And, although I certainly didn’t know it at that moment, that assault on modernity led inexorably to the founding of Pajamas Media and ultimately PJTV. Pajamas Media is very much a child of 9/11.

Not just because of me, of course. A large number of people banded together online then, realizing that a war of civilizations had been joined. They became known as the “war bloggers” and a good number of those bloggers are still with us now.

Was it by accident that Glenn Reynolds commenced Instapundit — our most popular blog — one month before 9/11?

Well, probably. But it was a fortuitous accident because it gave us some place to go and from which to expand outwards. The war bloggers were early adopters of sorts in the global struggle against fundamentalist Islam.

Or was it Islam itself? That is the question we are still asking ourselves ten years after that fateful day. As I write these words, news comes that the Libyan revolt against Gaddafi has been heavily infiltrated by allies of al-Qaeda, that same al-Qaeda that supposedly suffered a mortal blow with the assassination of bin Laden.

Of course, it didn’t, because Islamism (Islam?) is an ideology and ideologies only suffer a mortal blow when they are really and truly no longer popular. A cursory look at the so-called “Arab Spring” yields the opposite conclusion.

Irredentist Islam in its Sunni and Shiite strains is everywhere now, not only in Egypt, Libya, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and (hugely) Iran, but even in putatively secular Turkey where the reforms of Ataturk seem a distant memory. It has also spread to Latin America through the nefarious alliance of Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez.

And this Islamic ideology has a major advantage in durability over the totalitarian ideologies that pervaded the twentieth century — Nazism and communism. It promises eternal life. There is no easy way to disprove that.

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These days the Mossad is a more glamorous intelligence outfit than the CIA. Consequently films about the CIA tend to be pretty vapid, chic Hollywood drivel like the Bourne films, replete with the conventional anti-American cliches you expect from Tinseltown liberals. This leaks over to Mossad-Israeli films as well, the dimwitted Munich being an example. Spielberg is not exactly the guy for high-brow political thought and was manipulated by his screenwriter the tedious leftist Tony Kushner.

The Debt – just now in your theaters – is something completely different and a fabulous film. Lionel and I discuss it here.

If you’re in the mood, you can catch up with some back Poliwoods here.

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Tedious New York Times reactionary (sorry for the redundancy) Paul Krugman is rooting for Jon Huntsman in the Republican derby in Krugman’s new column, “Republicans Against Science”:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

Krugman’s all hopped up about those yahoos Rick Perry and Mitt Romney not being on board with anthropogenic global warming. What dunces. Krugman, after all, is an economist and we all know that is the most empirical of sciences — as opposed to the methods of those parvenus at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) who just came out with a new study of cosmic rays and clouds, which is turning climate science upside down:

CERN’s 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.

The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a “heliocentric” rather than “anthropogenic” approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

Oops. I guess Krugman hasn’t been keeping up with the latest issues of Nature.

Well, no matter. Forget CERN. They’re only the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and the world wide web began there, etc. What do they know? There are other sources like the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. I know, it’s a little outré. But not so outré that it doesn’t have the latest article by MIT’s resident climate genius Richard Lindzen, writing with Korean scientist Yong-Sang Choi, that calls so many aspects of climate modeling to question that your head spins. The entire article is available here, not that Krugman should have to read it. He’s a busy guy.

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Despite being the longest serving governor of one of our most populous states, a state currently generating more jobs than the rest of the country combined (or close), Rick Perry is supposed to be a dummy. At least, that’s what some of the lefty blogs and pundits would have us believe — you know, brainy types like Ed Schultz.

I am a graduate of two so-called elite Ivy League universities and I never noticed this problem when I met Perry. But never mind. Maybe an intellectually-challenged reputation is good to have from a stealth point of view. Remember Tom Sawyer and that fence?

Unfortunately, however, the jig is up. As of the last few days “Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America” has been making the rapid rounds on Kindle (#2 in “politics and current events”). This download is actually a longish chapter excerpted from a work-in-progress by Sasha Issenberg — “The Victory Lab” — about new, scientifically-based campaign techniques said to be transforming the American electoral process.

The chief architect of Perry’s strategies — and central figure in the chapter — is Dave Carney, a hulking three hundred pound, six foot four political pro from New Hampshire who once worked for George H. W. Bush. Said to be camera shy, if Perry wins, or even if he is nominated, Carney is likely to become as much of a household political name as Karl Rove or David Axelrod.

Indeed, if I were Axelrod, I would have been up last night poring over “Rick Perry and His Eggheads.” It’s filled with radical ideas about campaigning. Carney abjures such staples as lawn signs, targeted mailings, robocalls (Thank God!) and even, to a large extent, TV ads. He advocates instead personal appearances and flesh-pressing by the candidate, taking it to the people, as it were, something for which Perry clearly has a gift. This, in turn, generates a constant flow of media coverage on old and, perhaps more importantly, new media (Twitter, Facebook, even ye olde PJM).

Indeed, the MSM is almost purposefully disdained (up to a point, anyway). In his recent campaign for governor, Perry refused even to meet with the editorial boards of leading Texas newspapers, preferring to spend time with actual voters.

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Rick Perry only just announced his presidential run Saturday, but out here in the blue-blue City of Angels I am already detecting severe signs of PDS — Perry Derangement Syndrome.

Usually it goes like this: Okay, the economy is a little better in Texas than it is here (of course that’s the oil companies), but why does he have to be sooooo religious? What’s with all this Christ business all the time?

Most of this comes from liberal christians and jews (lower case deliberate) for whom public displays of faith are considered vulgar, even suspect. An Elmer Gantry lurks around every corner.

For the jews…okay Jews (I made my point)… their age-old knee-jerk response to evangelicals is heavily at play. This attitude is so outdated as to be laughable, but it is so ingrained in their psyches that these Jews have lost the ability to distinguish between friends and enemies. Even a cursory Google search reveals that Rick Perry is one of the greatest supporters of Israel ever to run for high office in this country. Of course, it’s quite possible that many of these Jews don’t care about that. But they should.

Nevertheless, who am I to talk? As the title of this essay indicates, I am an agnostic.

That may be one of the few things I share with the incumbent president since it’s hard to believe that he is even remotely devout. Recent liberal Democrats, Clinton and Obama, have a kind of wink-wink relationship with religion, largely attending church for political purposes. This is particularly true of Obama who, as we all know, rarely attends now, but spent two decades in the fold of the execrable race-hustler Jeremiah Wright, a man who would make Elmer Gantry blush. If his allegiance to the reverend wasn’t for political purposes, what was it? Let’s hope it was anyway. If he looked to Wright for spiritual guidance, Obama is suffering from some kind of delusional psychosis.

So what this agnostic observes is a general atmosphere of religious phoniness — a baseline hypocrisy — on the liberal side and what is often genuine religious faith on the conservative side. (Not all, of course. A number of libertarians are agnostic.).

Frankly, I prefer honesty. So I respect Perry for his faith. And, again as we all know, this country was founded on bedrock principles of religious tolerance, which some modern liberals tend to forget includes people who actually believe in God. Personally, I admire Perry’s belief, even envy it to some extent, because I am reaching the point in life at which I would be delighted if someone could convince me of an afterlife.

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It’s been a while since I’ve written a thriller, but I’ve finally been impelled to dust off the old fedora and channel my inner Phillip Marlowe (or Moses Wine) to unravel the mystery of just who are those forty percent or so who still favor Barack Obama in the polls.

(Cue noir thriller music)

With the economy and the stock market tanking faster than the 1976 Buccaneers, anarchists, thugs, and eye doctors wreaking mayhem from London to Damascus, our foreign policy, energy policy, and every other policy somewhere between non-existent and imploded, the reputation of the United States lower than Lindsay Lohan’s shoe, and the perpetually-vacationing president putting Nero to shame when it comes to fiddling, you would think Obama’s popularity would be in the low naughts.

But no. Something approaching half your fellow citizens still want this bozo to continue. Surely that large a percentage of the country could not simultaneously have had a lobotomy. There simply are not enough hospital rooms for that — with or without health care reform.

So what is the explanation for this? Yeah, I know a fair portion of our country is on the dole or working for the government directly and they don’t want to bite the hand that pays for their organic Big Macs, but that’s still not enough … not nearly …

(cue more cheesy thriller music)

I cocked the fedora, leaned back in my old swivel chair in my office on Pico & Figueroa (overlooking LA Live these days, the last of the fat cats living large in the penthouse of the new Ritz Carlton, dickering over whether Kobe is going to play for Turkey) and tamped on a trusty pack of Lucky Strikes. Good old Luckies, I thought, striking up a fag and trying not to be worried about being accused of homophobia because I still used that term. I’m a private dick, after all.

I took a deep drag and exhaled. There was nothing like sucking on a Lucky when you’re trying to solve a mystery. I’ve been sucking on them for going on fifty years — make that sixty. My dad of sainted memory always told me, if you’re going to smoke a cig, son, smoke a Lucky Strike. Don’t be one of the birch barners (I don’t know what that means, so don’t ask) who smoke Camels. That’s for wannabe dromedaries and aspiring jihadists. Not for my kid. Don’t worry if Lucky Strike goes out of business. You can always find them for a price on Ebay. It’s worth it.

So there’s been many a Lucky Strike between me and a lot of the violent crime here in the City of Angels, not to mention the broads. You could say I was hooked, if you wanted to. The doc diagnosed me with emphysema a while back and said I should kick the habit before my lungs turned into dark side of a Dempsey dumpster. But what’s a guy to do? When you need a Lucky, you need a Lucky.

Hey, wait a minute, I thought, sitting up straight. (I was having one of those eureka moments.) Those Luckies. My habit. That was just like politics. No one ever changes. Your father tells you you’re one thing … or maybe your mother … and that’s it. You’re that way forever — a Lucky smoker, staying away from Camels no matter what. Even if Camels have no nicotine and make you live to 120. You’re still with the Luckies.

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