As is tradition during this holiday season, I present my proverbial list of those who’ve recently been “naughty or nice.”

Since a lot of those deemed naughty could give a reindeer’s you-know-what about anything Christmas, good ol’ Santa Claus can rest easier knowing there are a few chimneys he can pass over….

Naughty
Actor and foreign policy expert George Clooney is angry with Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who haven’t spoken out against the war to his liking. Now I’m no longer in awe of actors and actresses who think they know everything about a subject simply because they got the opportunity to play a part in a movie. But what’s even more amazing is how these egotistical Hollywood elitists assume since they donate thousands of dollars to politicians, they will take that money and totally disregard the 99% plus of the population that will do the actual voting.

“I’m frustrated and disappointed. I hate it when smart men and women are saying, ‘Well, if I knew then what I know now.’ The fact is: I knew it then and I don’t have national security clearance. Basically, the Democrat leadership was scared and it’s too bad, because it has come back to haunt them.”

The point is (and previous pieces of mine with Democrat quotes prove) prior to the Bush Administration taking the reigns of power, almost all the Democrats “knew” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. It’s a pity that someone obviously as intelligent as George Clooney has blinded himself by his revulsion of all things Republican and Bush.

Too bad he doesn’t read my blogs. He might be better informed….

Nice
It’s really cool to hear that there are some in Hollywood that use the brains given. I’ve always liked Morgan Freeman. He again made me smile during an interview with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” when he said that the only way to end racism was to “stop talking about it.”

That is not going to make today’s civil rights activists happy, as “racism” to them is a paycheck. Freeman wants people to stop using the words “black” and “white.”

“I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history.”

Freeman and I seem to be on the same page that dedicating a special month for black history is causing further isolationism (multiculturalism) instead of all of us being on the same team as Americans.”

“How are we going to get rid of racism? Stop talking about it! I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You wouldn’t say, ‘Well, I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.’ You know what I’m saying?”

Yes sir, I do. Maybe one day I’ll rename my blog “American & Right”….

Naughty
We were taught as kids if you make a mistake about something, admit it and say “sorry.” Unfortunately those in the media and in power who distribute the “news” that shapes public opinion, has neither the conscience, the common courtesy, nor the humility to admit when they were wrong… again.

After Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the Gulf region, the common consensus by the media and liberal activists was that George Bush and Republicans teamed up with the storm to kill black people.

“They ignored us, they forgot about us… because we look like we look.”

• Damu Smith, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network

“All of the (civil rights) leaders have said that FEMA is insensitive because there are not enough blacks high up in FEMA, and certainly the Red Cross is the same. It’s too white. It is. If it represents those who are victims of disaster, should not those who are culturally sensitive to us be a part of that? Don’t you ever think that racism that has poisoned the bloodstream of religion, education, jurisprudence, politics, culture — that it is not existent in FEMA and the Red Cross?”

• Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan

“After the tragedy, I heard someone ask rhetorically, ‘What if this had been Nantucket, Massachusetts, or Inner Harbor Baltimore or Chicago or Houston?’ Are you convinced the response would have been the same? Was there any social or class or race aspect to the response?”

• NBC Anchor Brian Williams

““I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says theyÂ’re looting. See a white family, it says theyÂ’re looking for food….A lot of the people that could help are at war right now fighting another way, and theyÂ’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us…. George Bush doesnÂ’t care about black people.””

• Rapper Kanye West

Okay, got the picture?

For most of you out there, that was review. Anyway, even though FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina was the fastest in history, the “word” was that if New Orleans’ population was mostly white, the response would have been near instantaneous. Tell that to Florida….

But it’s now clear that while whites made up 28% of New Orleans’ population, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals reported that whites constitute 36.6% of the storm deaths. In the state as a whole, 47% of the 658 bodies identified were black and 42% were white. 247 are still unidentified.

Easy math: Katrina was not an attempt at ethnic genocide. Just a natural disaster and one with a racial component introduced without merit, and also without a national media and liberal civil rights activist acknowledgement of that erroneous accusation.

What else is new…?

Nice
It’s now okay for fair weather New England Patriots fans to jump on the bandwagon… again.

Naughty
Rapper Kanye West, suddenly the model of humility, hopes his new Grammy-nominated album “makes history.”

“’Late Registration’ is really important not just, because it was successful this year, but 10 years from now they’ll look back at what it did for the game. The usage of strings, all types of instrumentation, the musicality of it, the fact that we sat and waited two weeks to rent a real harpsichord to put on ‘Diamonds (For Sierra Leone)’ – that’s one instrument!”

Don’t mean to rain on Mr. West’s Grammy parade, but there was a time when “musicians” wrote songs from beginning to end (without sampling segments of songs decades old, which would have then been called stealing), and they actually used… instruments!

West may glow about his use of a harpsichord and strings, but there was once a man named Barry White who used the harpsichord and strings quite frequently. In fact, for some reason, he always seemed to have a harpsichord on hand thus he didn’t need to wait two weeks to get one. Real strings were used frequently going back to the days when music was first recorded, so Kanye West really needs to get his place in history in context.

“Now let’s take all the songs that were on there and add up the amount of work that went into it; this is the real thing. We put so much pain, blood, sweat, tears, time and money into it, so for it to be nominated is great, but for it to win would be the seal of the work. It really needs that. It would be the first album in Grammy history that was all rap that won for Album of the Year.”

Newsflash: making an album takes work. That’s why West gets paid the millions he does. What’s so nonsensical about this self-aggrandizement is that he now realizes that. He’s inadvertently verified what a lot of us have thought all along: rap music is whipped-together crap with “borrowed” licks written painstakingly by composers who weren’t lazy, and the “lyrics” are given even less time and thought.

Should Kanye West’s album “make history”, it will be because those who vote for it either forgot history or never really knew it in the first place.

Nice
Well, it looks like The Gray Lady is back to her old tricks again, and someone is calling her on the carpet for it.

Last week, New York Times’ James Risen wrote a story complaining that the Bush Administration was eavesdropping on Americans without court-approved warrants and that story suspiciously came out on the same day the Patriot Act was up for reauthorization. But Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn would have none of it, and it would seem there was a self-serving motive behind the timing and release of the story.

“At least two senators that I heard with my own ears cited this as a reason why they decided to vote to not allow a bipartisan majority to reauthorize the Patriot Act. Well, as it turns out the author of this article turned in a book three months ago and the paper, The New York Times, failed to reveal that the urgent story was tied to a book release and its sale by its author.”

James Risen, whose book “State of WAR: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration”, in his Times story made quite little of the fact that although judges weren’t given an opportunity to sanction the phonetaps, bi-partisan legislators on Capitol were notified. The phone conversations targeted were potential conversations of al Qaeda members abroad with persons here. Only liberals would have a problem with that.

Democrats and less than a handful of Republicans upheld a filibuster on the renewal of the expiring portions of the Patriot Act as it failed to get the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster. The liberal playing of games with national security should rightly be the issue next November.

President Bush responded, “As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have. The unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.”

No lie, and let’s pray the liberals’ making life easier for terrorists doesn’t come back to bite us.

Naughty
The latest mantra from the anti-war left is that President Bush should detail his war strategy for all to know. That would be like football coaches presenting their X’s and O’s on a blackboard hours before the Super Bowl. Are they that out of it to realize that giving away our military strategy would give an edge to the people who leave improvised explosive devices on public streets in Iraq an advantage?

Those of us on the right would like to know what the left proposes, since no plan seems to appeal to them. We’re not holding our breath….

“There is no one Democratic voice… and there is no one Democratic position.”

• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)

“As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we’ll have a position.”

• Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Yeah, right.

Naughty
“Iraq is worse than Vietnam.”

• Cindy Sheehan, leading a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Madrid

It must really suck to be on the 14th minute, 45th second of those “15 minutes of fame.”

Reportedly 100 protesters carried banners criticizing President Bush, and Sheehan continued to call President Bush a war criminal, this time on foreign soil. Funny how Spanish liberals have so quickly forgotten who bombed their trains and killed dozens, thus hastening their nation’s retreat from The War on Terror just as the terrorists ordered.

But Cindy cares about the troops….

Naughty
I’ve always been amazed by those who’ve won life’s lottery and yet lament how much life sucks. Yeah, I can relate…

“The blacker you are, the worse it is for you. If you’re mixed, you’ve got a shot. If you cater to what white America wants you to do and how they want you to look, you can survive. But if you want to be yourself, and try to do things that fit you, and your skin, nobody cares about that. At the end of the day, white America dominates and rules. And it’s racist.”

• Singer Mary J Blige, in an overseas interview with The Guardian

I’m not sure Mary J actually knows what she’s saying.

It’s a given conservatives don’t run the music business. The entertainment establishment is almost 95% liberal and if Blige contends the industry is racist, is she implying (you know, guilt by association) that liberals are racist?

I’d agree that some are confused. Just a few short decades ago during the “black is beautiful” days, any black person caught straightening their hair was called every name in the book. Today, black women represented in showbiz sport straight hair in every tint Clairol came up with.

The majority of black women who get the “deals” in Hollywood and New York are light skinned and that selection criteria is apparently by design.

Those of us who say that liberalism is inherently racist have been shouted down ad nauseum for years.

Mary J Blige: Welcome to my world.

Nice
I’d like to take the opportunity to close by pissing off those “inclusive” and “tolerant” progressive (or whatever they call themselves now) secularists off.

Have a Merry Christmas,
Bob

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2005 at 8:12 am and is filed under Bob Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.