What is amazing is how these dying broadcast networks continue to produce material that they know will be deeply offensive to perhaps half or more of their potential audience, even after the success of Fox, and how they continue to get sponsors. I have long wondered whether the large corporate owners of the networks simply didn’t view their ownership as protection money against the democrat party as well as a sort of unregulated “in-kind” political contribution. Certainly, companies like GE are not otherwise known to tolerate the perpetuation of poorly managed divisions that lose market share. Indeed, it would be interesting if someone brought a shareholder derivative action against the board of directors of these companies for waste of corporate assets through allowing their network divisions to pursue a money losing business strategy.

The noble efforts against CBS were aimed at the pocketbooks of would-be sponsors. You can’t really aim at Uncle Sam’s pocketbook since he has asserted the authority to take your money and gets to decide where it goes.

The boycott would probably have been less successful if targeted at PBS, which receive public dollars. Think of the BBC, which is essentially a govt. agency that sponges off an annual tax of TV sets to the tune of $174 US dollars. And they actively seek and attempt to jail license-fee-dodgers. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9231
A boycott wouldn’t work with them either.

But back to homebase: there’s always the problem of who screams the loudest, which matters much on some issues we discuss here. Conservatives tactics probably can’t compete with the fear of riots.

This letter to the Nov 5th New York Post hits the nail on the head:

“The obvious solution to the controversy surrounding CBS’ miniseries ‘The Reagans’ would have been for CBS to hand it over to its news division.

“That’s a place where fictional liberal propaganda and cheap shots are routinely passed off as fact.”

John Dell
Staten Island

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/letters/9960.htm

Posters at Lucianne described the “Reagan” scriptwriters as a “gay duo” and as the “wickedly gay duo.” Which made the following occur to me:

Back in the ’50s, before homosexual liberation, when liberals disapproved of homosexuality, when the ex-Communist Howard Fast wrote the novel Spartacus in which the oppressive Roman ruling class is rife with homosexuality, and in which Spartacus’s nemesis Marcus Crassus (played in the movie by Laurence Olivier), was fictionalized into a modern “fascist”-style ruler who is homosexual, Norman Mailer wrote an essay on the literary figure of “the homosexual villain.” Of course, homosexual villains have completely disappeared from literature and movies in the last 30 years or so. Maybe it’s time to bring them back?

On another point: Let’s understand that this movie is still going to be shown on Showtime, CBS’s cable station. It will then be available in video stores and libraries forever. So we haven’t won a real victory here. The pressure must be continued on CBS, which owns Showtime. If “Reagan” is too unfair and slanderous for CBS to show it on the air, why should it allow it to be shown it on cable?

My view may be a bit warped by my profession as an historian, but it seems to me that there have been far more vicious and dangerous distortions of history perpetrated on TV, not to mention Hollywood movies, which are even worse, than those reported about the Reagan movie. The distorted version of Peter Wyden’s book on the atomic bomb, back in the 1980s, (I forget the title, but it was the same as that of his book) was worse than that.

But that was my whole point, that we live under a total regime of leftist lies, and that conservatives only protest it SERIOUSLY in a rare case such as this.

That such a wretched revisionistic portrayal of President Reagen could be made 15 years after he left the presidency, to say nothing of the criticism he took while in office for doing things like speaking the truth, makes it even easier to accept Ann Coulter’s thesis about Sen. Joe McCarthy in her latest book.

I had accepted the gist of what she said, with some provisos, for most of my life. Reading “None Dare Call It Treason” by John Stormer at an early age probably helped. But I didn’t talk about it much until I learned that she was coming out in his defense.

This all points to how dangerous it is to let liberals be the tellers of history.

The villains in Disney animated features have often been an effeminate middle aged man. Think of Jeremy Iron’s Uncle Scar in “Lion King,” the governor in “Pocohontas,” the Grand Vizier in “Aladdin,” and so forth.

Interesting point by Mr. Sailer. I haven’t seen the latter two movies he mentions, but clearly Scar in “Lion King” is effeminate.

But then again, “Lion King” is traditionalist and non-PC in other ways as well, isn’t it? It lauds masculinity and heroism. Its main character is a king, after all, who realizes his destiny by overcoming fear and self-defeat and winning back his kingdom. So, “Lion King” may be an exception that proves the rule.

However, since Mr. Sailer points to other Disney movies with homosexual or effeminate villains, they can’t all be exceptions that prove the rule. So perhaps the answer is that the homosexual villain is an archetype that will always be present in literature and popular entertainment, even in the age of PC!

Thucydides has indicated to me that I’m using “exception that proves the rule” incorrectly. As he points out, an exception proves a rule in the sense of putting a rule to the proof. It does not logically establish anything.

So it would appear that lots of people including me have been using this expression incorrectly all their lives (and when has anyone used it _correctly_?). It had often occurred to me in passing that the expression didn’t quite make sense, but I had never looked it up. I had the idea that an exception “proves the rule” in the sense that, by the very fact of being an exception, it proves that in most other cases the rule does hold. But that may be sophistry. So perhaps the correct expression in most situations would simply be, “That’s an exception TO the rule,” rather than “That’s an exception that PROVES the rule.”