As a fervent Blue Jays fan I would definitely say to the Yankees, Jeter at a different position? Are you mad? Derek Jeter is THE shortstop of the century and has to stay there, just like he says, right through 2014. Everybody knows that range and quickness are over-rated: what really matters is that he almost never fails to catch any ball he can reach. And of course, the kiddies will be screaming and screaming for him at every home game no matter what he does.
Genuine Witchcraft: Anne Coulter
Anne Coulter’s take:
Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis.
Just when decent, intelligent conservatives like David Brooks start to make sense, it is so reassuring to have demagogues like Anne Coulter around to reassure us liberals that we are indeed on the right track. We must be, for heaven’s sake, because the opposition sounds like they think there was nothing wrong with McCarthyism.
So which parts of the liberal “hegemony” on McCarthy were “lies”? The parts about the bullying, the lying about his war record, the drinking, the wild, undocumented, unproven allegations? The smears of decent writes, actors, and politicians?
Unfortunately, there are those who pretend to be astonished and enlightened when they discover that the Soviet Union, like the U.S., really did have spies in America in the 1950’s, and, therefore, McCarthy was “right”.
Few things in life are more depressing than the fact that it needs to be pointed out to some people that what was wrong with McCarthy was not that he thought there were communists and his opponents thought that there weren’t, which wasn’t true in any case. The problem was that his approach to dealing with communism was to behave exactly how he accused them of behaving.
As many of his contemporaries observed, McCarthy was probably the best friend the communists had– he made opponents of communism look like idiots.
Finally, if Anne Coulter had even the smallest, slightest, sliver of integrity, she would at least acknowledge that even early on in his career, McCarthy smeared as communists anyone who disagreed with him over anything. He was utterly, irredeemably self-serving.
Like Anne Coulter.
Why shouldn’t they apologize for McCarthy? They are reviving McCarthyism. Senator Peter King (Republican) of Nassau County is going to hold hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims. He claims that 80% of American mosques are run by “extremists”, and makes a number of other inflammatory accusations without offering any proof.
Subversion of American Institutions
The cause of anti-communism, which united millions of Americans and which gained the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents, was undermined by Sen. Joe McCarthy … McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the U.S. government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love … Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions. William Bennett
So says William Bennett. It’s wonderful how conservatives struggle mightily to salvage some kind of useful propaganda from even the most scurrilous, scabrous, contemptible expression of their ideals: “legitimate” efforts to combat communist subversion? “Legitimate”. Such as what? The House Un-American Activities Committee? The blacklist? The Viet Nam War? The Coups in Guatemala, Iran, Chile? Attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro? Spying on Daniel Ellsberg? Censoring American history books? What? Which “legitimate” efforts?
Bennett includes Democrats in his list. How nice. McCarthy’s was famous for accusing anyone who didn’t suck up to him personally of being a communist, terrifying political opponents into pretending to support him. Bennett survey’s the wreckage of McCarthy’s cheap pandering and pronounces himself so pleased that the Democrats so cheerfully acquiesced. I’m surprised he didn’t claim that President Eisenhower, a conservative Republican who despised McCarthy, and who was also afraid of being accused of being soft on communism, wasn’t really one of McCarthy’s fondest admirers. Really. Seriously.
I can just imagine a Roman Catholic prelate in the 1600’s– it’s such a shame that a few Jesuits get carried away and brought discredit on our legitimate efforts to root out witchcraft…
Amen.
And now the present.
The Wonder Years Without the Music
Here’s my second brilliant idea of the month!
As you may or may not have heard, a well-regarded TV series, “The Wonder Years”, has never been released on DVD. Why not? Lots and lots of people want it. Well, the problem is that “The Wonder Years” used a lot of popular music in the background of many episodes. At the time, the cost of using pop music in a tv show or movie was negligible. Now it is not. Everyone got greedy. Of course, the owners of “The Wonder Years” are also greedy– they are dissatisfied with the amount of money they will make if they have to pay all those royalties.
The funny thing is, you could probably acquire most of the songs used in the show for a very reasonable cost, if you just bought them on iTunes. Maybe you already have copies of those songs. In fact, if you are fan of the “The Wonder Years”, chances are pretty good that you already have a fully licensed, fully paid for copy of the songs used in the show.
So what we need is software.
What we need is for the owners of “The Wonder Years” to release the series on special DVD’s without the expensive already paid-for music. You put the DVD in your computer and this special software scans your hard drive, finds the missing music, and synchronizes it. Then it burns the entire DVD to a new blank. Problem solved.
The only problem is that this would make naked a little-understood fact about copyright: you are paying twice, three, four times for the right to listen to the same song, whether you have the album, the CD, the iTunes version, or a movie or TV show with that song on it, your wedding video (if your videographer paid for and charged you for the rights– not likely.)
And by the way, it’s not the artists who are greedy, of course. It’s people who usually swindled the artists out of their rights in the first place. They’ll be damned if you get to watch “The Wonder Years” or the great documentary on the civil rights movement, “Eye on the Prize” with the music.
Fred Savage, who played “Kevin” on “The Wonder Years” grew up surrounded by some of the most beautiful and, in the case of his co-star Danica McKellar, smart, women in Hollywood.
Who did he end up marrying? Someone he met in kindergarten.
I had stopped watching “The Wonder Years” after a year or so because I thought it was getting too precious, and I began to find the narration annoying. I just read a TV critic who feels that the narration “made the show”. Hey, maybe I was wrong. I don’t know. I won’t be able to re-examine the idea until it does finally get released on DVD. Or not.