PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

Chaser:

“Well, there’s that passage about tearing down the Wall,” Reagan said. “That Wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say.”

The speech was circulated to the State Department and the NSC three weeks before it was to be delivered. For three weeks, State and the NSC fought the speech. They argued that it was crude. They claimed that it was unduly provocative. They asserted that the passage about the Wall amounted to a cruel gimmick, one that would unfairly raise Berliners’ hopes. There were telephone calls, memoranda, and meetings. State and the NSC submitted their own alternative drafts–as best I recall, there were seven–one of them composed by Kornblum. In each, the call for Gorbachev to tear down the Wall was missing.

This presented Tom Griscom with a problem. On the one hand, he had objections to the speech from virtually the entire foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government. On the other, he had Ronald Reagan. The president liked the speech. Griscom had heard him say so. The president especially liked the passage about tearing down the Berlin Wall, the very part of the speech to which the foreign policy experts were most vehemently opposed. If that passage had to come out, it would be Griscom’s job to explain to Reagan why.

The week before the president’s departure, the battle reached a pitch. Every time State or the NSC registered a new objection to the speech, Griscom summoned me to his office, where he had me tell him, one more time, why I was convinced State and the NSC were wrong and the speech, as I had written it, was right. (On one of these occasions, Colin Powell, then national security adviser, was waiting in Griscom’s office for me. I held my ground as best I could.) Griscom was evidently waiting for an objection that he believed Ronald Reagan himself would find compelling. He never heard it. When the president departed for the Venice summit, he took with him the speech I had written.

On the very morning Air Force One left Venice for Berlin, the State Department and the National Security Council made a last effort to block the speech, forwarding yet another alternative draft. Griscom chose not to take it to the forward cabin. Air Force One landed. Hours later, President Reagan delivered his speech.

There is a school of thought that Ronald Reagan managed to look good only because he had clever writers putting words into his mouth. (Perhaps the leading exponent is my former colleague Peggy Noonan, who while a Reagan speechwriter appeared in a magazine article under a caption that said just that: “The woman who puts the words in the president’s mouth.”) There is a basic problem with this view. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, George Bush, and Bob Dole all had clever writers. Why wasn’t one of them the Great Communicator?

Because we, his speechwriters, were not creating Reagan; we were stealing from him. Reagan’s policies were straightforward–he had been articulating them for two decades. When the State Department and the National Security Council began attempting to block my draft by submitting alternative drafts, they weakened their own case. Their drafts lacked boldness. They conveyed no sense of conviction. They had not stolen, as I had, from Frau Elz–and from Ronald Reagan.

—“Tearing Down That Wall,” Peter Robinson in The Weekly Standard, then-edited by Bill Kristol, June 23rd, 1997.

Related: Blinken continues cleanup of Biden’s Putin ‘cannot remain in power’ remark.

More: Zelensky Responds to Joe Biden’s ‘Historic’ NATO Speech in Less Than Flattering Terms.

“TV – THAT’S WHERE MOVIES GO WHEN THEY DIE:” Rewatching the First Televised Oscars.

One decision the AMPAS board of 1953 did not have to anguish over was the selection of the host: the availability of stand-up comedian and radio and film superstar Bob Hope made life easy. The most versatile, reliable, and motor-mouthed MC of the mid-twentieth century, especially when his writers were waiting in the wings, Hope had first hosted the ceremonies in 1940 when Gone With the Wind took home eight Oscars (“What a wonderful thing — this benefit for David Selznick!”) and he would perform the duty 13 times in all, up until 1978.

The minute Hope walks to the podium he owns the room.  His cascade of non-stop punchlines taps two main veins: side-eyed swipes at television (“Jack Warner still refers to TV as that furniture that stares back”) and the long-running gag about his unrequited Oscar-love. (“I like to be here just in case. You can never tell — one year there might be one left over.”) For viewers under a certain age, Hope’s topical humor may require a footnote. “Don’t glare at me, you melted-down Stevenson button!” he snaps at the shelf of Oscars stage left. When actor Ray Milland walks off stage, he muses, “I wonder if he ever redeemed his typewriter.” An evergreen joke that cuts both ways gets the biggest laugh of the night: “TV — that’s where movies go when they die.”

In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars:

Actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion. And where there are new gods, there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with the lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was [MGM’s Louis B.] Mayer’s brilliant idea [in 1929] to create the Oscars, where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews, to award-winning American producers.

Not to mention, as one biographer quoted Mayer, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Of Boiling and Jumping Frogs.

It is difficult to plumb the depths of cynicism that fires the Biden Administration’s motions with respect to Ukraine. On the one hand, we are being invited to join in a grandiose morality play in which the great white-hatted forces of the West talk endlessly about peace and democracy while waging or at least fomenting war. On the other hand, the war drums drown out the cries of ordinary people, those millions of people Hillary Clinton and her ilk dismiss as “deplorable,” who acknowledge Putin’s crimes but also acknowledge Ukraine’s deep corruption and totalitarian leanings and wonder why we are strangling ourselves to intervene in that battle.

The ostensible reason, of course, is to export truth, justice, and the American way, and to teach that bully Putin a lesson. The real reason, I suspect, is to consolidate power at home while attempting to fire up the war-profit machine abroad. So far, Americans have gritted their teeth and taken it. I am not sure, however, that those with their fingers on the knobs of the burner have been sufficiently careful about how quickly they are raising the temperature. Things can get out of hand very quickly, and I am not just talking about military showdowns.

When average families can no longer pay their rent or mortgage, gas up their car, or even put food on the table, all bets are off. Our rulers think they have anesthetized those portions of the population they have not simply bought off. They might find that there is quite a lot of jump left in the frog yet. If so, they may be the ones in hot water.

As VDH recently wrote: The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Sally Field: If I See Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott ‘I Cannot Be Responsible for What I Would Do.’

Actress Sally Field says that if she sees Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) or Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), she “cannot be responsible for what I would do.”

“Those men who are doing that, and they’re mostly male governors who are doing it, are so backward, so ignorant and really just power hungry,” the Forest Gump star told Variety, after being asked what she thinks of these pro-life legislation in states like Texas and Florida.

“I think it’s criminal. They’re so wanting to roll back the achievements and important progress for women, for blacks, for the LGBTQ community. I can’t say enough horrible things about what I feel about those men,” Sally Field continued said while not specifying what’s “criminal” about what’s being done.

“If you see them coming toward me, those two governors specifically [Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis], lead me out of the way because I cannot be responsible for what I would do. Heidi [she addresses her publicist, who is in the room],” Field declared.

“Do you hear me? Lead me away,” the Smokey and the Bandit actress said.

While it’s true that, as Kyle Smith wrote in 2018, “Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang,” that doesn’t mean that most Americans want those symptoms to spread. In any case, as Kurt Schlichter wrote last week, DeSantis “loves to crush his enemies, see them driven before him, and to hear the lamentation of their women-identifying persons. And those of us in the base love it.”

JON STEWART BUSTS MEDIA’S ‘JAIL-GASM’ OVER MUELLER, PERVERSE INCENTIVES:

As NewsBusters previously reported, comedian Jon Stewart dedicated an entire episode of his Apple TV show, The Problem With Jon Stewart to how the media overplayed their hand with the Mueller report and filled their coverage with “bulls***,” and effectively turned it into a “noose-tightened, closed-walled, family-style jail-gasm.” But there was more to the show as he brought on media insiders to discuss the problem and surprisingly sat down with former Disney CEO and ABC News boss, Bob Iger.

* * * * * * * *

And that’s where the interview with Iger immediately picked up. “Do you have an idea of why they might be so reluctant to speak publicly,” Stewart wondered. Iger chalked it up to news organizations “being criticized in a way that they’ve never experienced before” and they’ve formed “a bit of a bunker mentality[.]”

Things got a bit tense when Stewarts was pressing Iger on how ratings drive what’s being shown to viewers and Iger was very defensive:

IGER: If you’re asking whether there have been incidents when news organizations fail to carry things because they don’t think they’ll be of interest to their audience. I’m sure that’s the case.

STEWART: I’m not saying instances. I’m saying that’s been shaping –

IGER: You think it’s a regular thing.

STEWART: And not told in the right way.

IGER: Not being — see that’s, that’s I would, I would argue that there are stories that are not told because there’s a belief that people aren’t interested them. I don’t think there are stories that are told that are told inaccurately just to make them more interesting to people—

STEWART: It’s not inaccurate.

IGER – I’m defending an organization as opposed to news in general. I just don’t have enough—

STEWART: But trust in news during the Cronkite era was it was one of the most valued institutions. Today, it’s somewhere between Congress and herpes.

The Cronkite era, you say? Walter Cronkite: Liberalism in the Guise of Objectivity.

ROSS DOUTHAT: We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies.

DAVID SOLWAY: The Pandemic State Is Here to Stay.

The “pandemic state” is here to stay for the indefinite future, though in different manifestations. Political authority has devolved into one or another form of totalitarian governance, characterized by disparate structures of repression as they arise across the political spectrum. In his must-read Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital IDs Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom, Nick Corbishley exposes the technology of population control, showing that a return to normality is a mere fantasy.

No new virus need emerge. Pandemic psychology controls the public mind and pandemic policy has prepared the way for a new political order—Schwab’s “global strategic framework of governance,” that is, a fascist regime in all but name. The norms and customs we took for granted will not return. Metaphorically, it is as if someone who has been severely wounded or disfigured must still bear the scars and impediments of his trauma. The handicap is here to stay.

Moreover, far too many people seem to love their injury. There is no going back to a previous condition of comparative innocence and social flexibility. The state will continue to further corrode traditional liberties—privacy, assembly, mobility, communication, currency—towards the goal of citizen submission to a dominant citadel of power, an administrative panopticon. And as de la Boétie understood, the majority will willingly comply, the paradoxical source of their own affliction. The lockdown state has the blessing of the multitudes. When exfiltration is not possible, there is little option for the remnant but to resist inwardly and refuse to give consent to their political abusers.

The heritage of the Judeo-Christian West, based on faith in a higher power, the rule of law and the sovereignty of the individual, has been decisively breached. We now inhabit a time of domestic menace. For those who continue to cherish their liberty, the best we can do is plan and cope.

Flashback: Are you ready for the climate lockdowns? It’s only a matter of time.

HELLO, I MUST BE GOING: Phil Collins bids emotional farewell to fans at his final concert.

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: The last American tourist.

I was driving along a curvy English road outside a village in Gloucestershire a few weeks ago when a sign loomed on our left. It said:

CATS

EYES

REMOVED

My first thought was: What a horrible way to make a living in this day and age, even out here in the countryside. So much for All Things Bright and Beautiful… Maybe those people who said that Brexit would turn the English into depraved monsters were right.

I was jumping to conclusions. It hadn’t been put up by an entrepreneur or veterinarian but by the highway authority. Cat’s eyes are what the English call those super-reflective bumps embedded in the stripes on minor highways to keep drivers from drifting across lanes. The sign was a warning that this curvy road had recently become much more dangerous. But how, in this heavily touristed part of England, was a non-English driver to know that?

It was a theoretical question. No place today is “heavily touristed.” The past two years have seen an extraordinary lull in international travel, due at first to Covid but later to the stubborn persistence of the measures taken to contain it, and all the exertion, expense, inconvenience and indignity they have entailed: The overzealous nurses who think “nasal swab” is Italian for “cerebral probe.” The angry flight attendants shaking you awake in the middle of the night to tell you your mask has slipped off your nose…

All this has changed the culture of yesterday’s hotspots. Americans — bossy, querulous, ubiquitous — have for the last two years been almost entirely absent. Foreign countries suddenly feel more foreign. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, the era in which we exuberantly measured our civilization’s advance by tallying new McDonald’s had come to an end. London’s fastest-growing franchise chain seems to the be the Indian teahouse Chaiiwala, which started in Leicester in 2015 (and is really superb). The one in Brompton Road has a prayer room downstairs.

Read the whole thing.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Supreme Court is about to get a justice who goes easy on sexual exploiters of children.

H.D. MILLER: The Abernathy Boys Go for a Ride.

The point, however, is that, before World War I, children did things that we don’t think of as childish, which is how it had always been. Children have always been much more capable than we currently give them credit for being, for better (the Abernathys) or worse (like poor Shorpy). Yes, children should be children, free to do childish things, but they also need to be challenged and given progressive responsibility as they grow older. Our failure to understand this is one of sadder things about our current world.

The second sad thing, of course, is the closing of possibility. 1910 America was a wild and wide-open place. It was exciting, loud, grubby, glittering, frequently coarse and surprisingly refined, all at the same time. There were righteous causes to champion, and great injustices to fight. But, above all else, you could do things. It wasn’t exactly a frontier, anymore, but close enough for a pair of boys to mount their ponies and ride across. And that’s the biggest change of all, so many possibilities are gone, so much has been foreclosed to us and our children.

Read the whole thing,

JOHN NOLTE: Disney’s Support for Child Grooming Is a Game Changer.

We now live in a country where one of our two major political parties and the corporate media are pro-grooming. On top of a Supreme Court nominee who obviously does not see child porn as a terrible thing, who’s seeking to gradually de-criminalize child porn, the entire Democrat party has come out against a Florida bill meant to stop teachers from grooming little kids. All the Florida bill does is forbid the classroom teaching of sexuality in kindergarten through third grade. That’s all it does. In my mind, it doesn’t go far enough. Schools should not be teaching sexuality, period. But Democrats and the media are angry that kids aged four to seven are not having their innocence shattered when they should be learning to read and write.

Also in favor of sexual grooming is the Walt Disney Co.

In what will be remembered as one of the greatest betrayals in the world of entertainment, the Walt Disney Co. has not only come out against Florida’s “don’t-groom-little-kids” bill, Disney is agreeing to use its brand and platforms to take up the slack with its own grooming.

Disney’s first move was to add a same-sex kiss to its new theatrical blockbuster, Buzz Lightyear.

What decent parent wants to expose their little kids to that kind of sexual confusion, to any sort of sexuality?

Disney has also promised to ramp up its gay and transsexual content in children’s shows.

Think about what a betrayal this is…

Disney — Disney! —is looking to groom your kids, to come between parent and child, to manipulate and shape their sexuality before it develops naturally. To what end? For what purpose? We all know what the endgame is. To twist your kids into damaged and sexualized objects who can be exploited.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

DON’T GO FULL ‘LIBERTY CABBAGE’ ON RUSSIA: Orchestras Pull Tchaikovsky From Concerts Over Russia’s War on Ukraine.

Several orchestras have recently announced changes to their concert programs, removing the legendary Romantic-era composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky from their lineups amid the Russian war on Ukraine.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine at the end of February, and several large companies and corporations have since cut ties with Russia in response. Even more support for Ukraine has been shown as citizens across the world have personally boycotted Russian-based goods or services, but some internet users say that the banning of 19th-century classical music might be taking it a step too far.

On Wednesday, Wales’ Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra announced it would be removing Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” from a March 18 concert.

Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic Period, best known for his ballets, “The Nutcracker,” “Swan Lake,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” as well as several more famous concertos and symphonies, including “1812 Overture.” The composer died in 1893 in St. Petersburg, Russia.

A statement on the orchestra’s official website said, “In light of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra, with the agreement of St. David’s Hall, feel the previously advertised programme including the 1812 Overture to be inappropriate at this time.”

Related: Do You Remember 9/11 And How They Cleansed World History Of All Mention Of Muslims? Neither do I.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DEMOCRACY DIES IN AIRBRUSHING: Not a joke: The Washington Post is legit describing child pornography as just “pornography.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Holy Cringe: No, Elizabeth Warren, Student Debt is Not a ‘Gender Justice’ Issue.

Today’s a day that ends in y, so Elizabeth Warren is posting cringe again.

“Women owe over two-thirds of student debt,” the Massachusetts Democrat tweeted Thursday. “Canceling student debt would help give millions of women a fair shot at starting a business, saving for a home, and pursuing their dreams. Student debt is a gender justice issue. It’s time for [President Biden] to act.”

Suffice it to say that I find this attempt to put woke bubble wrap around a terrible policy proposal utterly unconvincing.

Someone needs to ask Warren if she can define what a woman is.

Related:

CRISES BY DESIGN: Biden’s sanctions hit USA hardest. “The war won’t have much of an effect on the price of Wheaties, but economic sanctions on Russia will blow back on us hard. Biden’s banking blockade already is diminishing the power of the dollar.”

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: As Crime Explodes, Panic Rooms Become LA’s Hottest Trend.

Related: ‘Crime tourists’ from South America are being blamed for at least two recent burglaries in an affluent San Francisco Bay area community.

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Reporters and Pundits Rave Biden’s Warsaw Speech a ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Moment – Before WH Walkback.

President Joe Biden stunned pundits and politicians on Saturday when, at the end of a fiery speech in Warsaw, he seemed to endorse regime change in Russia, saying Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”

His speech caused a huge reaction, particularly among members of the media and public figures in areas of foreign policy and politics. That included a lot of people on social media comparing his commentary to Ronald Reagan’s historic “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Berlin in June of 1987.

If it isn’t clear which part of the speech the verified users were reacting to, it was spelled out explicitly several times. They were reacting very directly to his saying that Putin cannot remain in power, which was widely discussed as meaning a call for regime change.

Exit quote: “WH official: When Reagan said ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ he did not mean to suggest any physical walls be torn down and certainly not in Berlin. He was referring to Pink Floyd’s album The Wall and was calling on Gorby to write a critical review.”

Heh, indeed.™

THE FALL OF SEATTLE:

What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.

Read the whole thing.

UNEXPECTEDLY! UNICEF ‘blindsided’ by Taliban reneging on its pledge to allow girls to be educated.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: With Babylon Bee Off Twitter, Users Forced To Get Fake News From CNN.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Biden’s Cognitive Decline Proved to Be REALLY Dangerous This Week.

And that story was written before Biden ad-libbed calling for regime change in Russia: White House Rushes To Clean Up Disastrous Remarks Biden Made About Putin During Speech.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Tonight is Earth Hour. Here’s how you can participate.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! AND TRYING TO AVOID WORLD WAR III: In a Stunning Reversal, White House Walks Back Biden Statement That Putin ‘Cannot Remain in Power.’

AND THE ANSWER IS NONE. NONE MORE GRAUNIAD: I let a baby bird nest in my hair for 84 days. He fell asleep in my palm. As far as he was concerned, I was his mother.