http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L5EEPiN4O8
President Allergic to Budgeting and Hostile to Business Proclaims April is the Month to Teach Kids to ‘Budget Responsibly’
Barack Chutzpah Obama.
President Barack Obama, who has increased the national debt by $53,377 per household, has proclaimed April “National Financial Capability Month,” during which his administration will do things such as teach young people “how to budget responsibly.”
“I call upon all Americans to observe this month with programs and activities to improve their understanding of financial principles and practices,” Obama said in an official proclamation released Friday.
“My Administration is dedicated to helping people make sound decisions in the marketplace,” he said.
“Together, we can prepare young people to tackle financial challenges–from learning how to budget responsibly to saving for college, starting a business, or opening a retirement account,” he said.Wow. They string all these words together as if they intend them to mean something other than what Obama’s policies and record actually mean. There’s even a section on “Managing Debt and Credit.” Under Obama’s watch, the US has managed to rack up more debt than all previous presidents, and our national credit rating has been downgraded.
And no, this isn’t an April Fool’s Joke. It’s real. Too bad our unsustainable debt and Obama’s lack of a budget are also real.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/04/01/president-allergic-to-budgeting-and-hostile-to-business-proclaims-april-is-the-month-to-teach-kids-to-budget-responsibly/
Bureaucratic Incompetence
Sadly, bureaucracy is a time-honored tradition in the United States government, but perhaps no greater bureaucratic juggernaut exists today than the Veteran’s Administration (VA) run by the Obama Administration.The abject failure of the VA under the leadership of the three-ring circus we know as the Obama Administration is a case in point that increasing funding does little to inject competence or efficiency.
Recent documents from an Internal Veterans Affairs Department reveal some veterans actually die before receiving the care they need and others are forced to wait up to eight months to see a doctor, well beyond the VA’s standard of 14 days.
A House Veterans Oversight and Investigations committee appointed to look into the problem found evidence the VA is falsifying numbers and closing out veterans’ appointment requests in response to the backlog. According to the Military Times, the committee chairman, Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), cites reasons for the closeouts include: “the request was years old, too much time had elapsed, or the veteran had died.”
A March 14, 2013 witness testimony by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Health Care Director, Debra Draper stated no one actually knows how long veterans are waiting for care because “the reported dates are unreliable” -- a large number of VA appointment schedulers don’t know how to do their job, the whole system is obsolete, and dates are massaged to “show clinic wait times within VHA’s performance goals.”
I digress to note that similar complaints are also documented within Britain’s National Healthcare System where workers manipulate numbers to meet quotas to keep their jobs. If the VA can’t provide benefits to our nation’s veterans, how does the Obama administration plan to deliver healthcare for 30-plus million Americans?
Liberals would have us believe that a bloated federal government has the ability to play a meaningful role in nurturing people’s lives, but if they can’t get this one right, they just need to just fuhgeddaboutit. Case closed. Done.
Additionally, internal VA documents secured by the Center for Investigative Reporting found wait times for first-time disability compensation claims and other benefit claims are much longer than the VA cares to admit, with claims taking anywhere from 316 to 642 days.
In the first year of President Obama’s presidency, 11,000 veterans were on a claim waiting list for more than a year. Five years later, despite promises for improvement, and massive dollars “invested,” the situation has deteriorated.
Those on a one-year waiting list for claims rose by more than 2000 percent, to 245,000 in 2012. Currently, the average wait time for 900,000 veterans who have been willing to sacrifice life and limb for our freedom is 273 days. With that kind of malfeasance taking place under my watch, I think I’d do a little less golfing if I were president.
If you think this has something to do with “the mess Obama inherited,” then think again. The Center for Investigative Reporting found, “the average wait time for veterans filing disability claims fell by more than a third under President George W. Bush, even as more than 320,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans filed disability claims.” It’s actually about priorities, wouldn’t you say?
Jon Stewart effectively nailed it using humor March 27 on The Daily Show when he said, “McDonalds handles ten times that many customers in an hour, and may I remind you, they are run by a clown.” Sadly, though, the ineptitude of this administration is no laughing matter.
http://townhall.com/columnists/susanstamperbrown/2013/04/01/bureaucratic-incompetence-n1554551/page/full/
VA Investigates $42M in Awards Processed by Employee
Lawmakers: Why were 1,500 awards just below the public disclosure threshold?
The employee processed more than 1,500 awards that ranged between $24,500 and $24,980–below the $25,000 disclosure threshold–over an approximately 18-month period, according to Bloomberg:
The inquiry focuses on a staff member who oversees orders for some VA health facilities in New York and New Jersey and who processed transactions worth more than $42 million over a roughly 18-month period. A letter from a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee said that the purchases ranged in amounts between $24,500 and $24,980.
Transactions of $25,000 and more are generally required to be published on a federal government procurement website to encourage as many bids as possible. [...]
Lawmakers said they were concerned that many of the transactions were done on the same day with a single vendor, and potentially violated a federal law requiring agencies to seek competitive bids for government work, the letter said.The VA is expected to release a response this week on the investigation.
http://freebeacon.com/va-investigates-awards-processed-by-employee-worth-42m/
University Compares Pro-Life Students to White Supremacists
The Student Government Association at Johns Hopkins University compared pro-life students to white supremacists and denied them official club status at the school.“They were denied status because the students on the student council felt being pro-life violates their harassment policy,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America.”
Hawkins told Fox News the student group, called Voice for Life, is searching for an attorney and they plan on fighting the ban.
The SGA at Johns Hopkins voted March 12 to deny Voice for Life the right to become an official student club. That vote was affirmed on March 24 by the SGA’s senate.
SGA representatives did not return calls seeking comment.
“We were pretty shocked when the students showed their bias toward the pro-life students,” Hawkins said.
According to emails obtained by Fox News, members of the SGA compared the pro-life students to white supremacists.
“And this is why we don’t approve groups like Voice for Life,” one SGA member wrote, linking to an article about a white supremacist group at Towson University.
Hawkins said the comparison was particularly offensive to African-American members of the pro-life group.
“To compare pro-lifers with white supremacists – it’s unreal,” she said.
Another SGA member said they objected to pro-life displays at Johns Hopkins, saying she “felt personally violated, targeted and attacked at a place where we previously felt safe and free to live our lives.”
An SGA senator said “we have the right to protect our students from things that are uncomfortable. Why should people have to defend their beliefs on their way to class?”
Andrew Guernsey, a student at Johns Hopkins and president of Voice for Life, said they simply want to exercise their right to free speech and association.
“It is inconsistent with the JHU’s motto ‘The Truth Will Set You Free’ for the SGA to try to hide its students – many future doctors and nurses – from the truth about abortion and how it hurts women, families and most of all, innocent preborn babies,” he said.
And that’s the problem, according to another private email from an SGA senator.
“If their sole and fundamental purpose is to stop students from having abortions, that’s not what we need,” the senator wrote. “I understand people’s right to freedom of speech, but this is a private university, and as such, we have the right to protect our students from things that are uncomfortable.”
Hawkins said the emails are proof that the senators violated their own constitution.
“They strive to create free speech and free expression on campus and they’ve openly violated it,” she told Fox News. “
Hawkins conceded that on private university campuses – free speech is not necessarily free.
“Sadly, this happens time and time again on private university campuses,” she said. “They feel like they don’t have to uphold freedom of speech.”
Ironically, she said, on the same day their group was denied status, the student lawmakers approved status for a pro-Palestinian group.
“That group actually has a history of violence on other campuses along with anti-Semitism,” she said.
http://www.redstate.com/toddstarnes/2013/04/01/university-compares-pro-life-students-to-white-supremacists/
Google Honors Cesar Chavez on Easter
Take a trip down Marxist memory lane to Veteran’s Day 2010:
At least Bing was not as bad – they displayed a beautiful picture of Ukrainian Easter Eggs for their chosen page today. I can live with that – but an avowed Alinsky Socialist who was honored by our Marxist president? That just pisses me off. I’m not the only one either.
Some background on Cesar Chavez is in order here:
The late United Farm Workers leader was trained by the famous Chicago agitator, Saul Alinsky. Obama’s mentor and idol. Marxists of a feather…
KeyWiki:
In 1947, Saul Alinsky hired Fred Ross, an experienced organizer among California’s migrant farmworkers. Ross built the Community Service Organization in several cities, mostly among Latinos, recruiting new members and identifying potential leaders through house meetings and one-on-one conversations. In San Jose, California, one of the people Ross recruited was César Chávez, whom Ross hired and trained as an organizer. Chávez would later adopt these organizing ideas in starting the United Farm Workers union.Chavez linked arms with Communist Party USA members such as Bert Corona. He was closely tied to Democratic Socialists of America as well.
New Zeal:
Trained for several years in Chicago, by the great agitator Saul Alinsky, an inspiration to DSA, Hillary Clinton and Obama himself, Cesar Chavez worked with communists and socialists his entire career.Chavez marched under the infamous slogan “Si se puede!” – later translated into English to become Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan “Yes we can!” Many of the same radicals that marched with Chavez wound up working with Barack Obama. An identical Marxist ideology was carried forward into the Obama Administration. Among the biggest names in the Alinsky/communist/socialist movement include former Obama Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, DSA icon Dolores Huerta and Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa. California’s 32nd District Rep. Judy Chu also has Chavez ties and was a long-time affiliate of the now defunct Communist Workers Party.
I have long said that if you can, don’t use Google. Use Bing or another search engine. Google is so prevalent though, it is difficult to do this. If you are a Christian or a Conservative Constitutionalist, your principles may dictate that you find a way to get away from this Marxist propaganda tool that is being wielded by Obama and his cronies.
Some will say Google is doing this just to get attention. No, they don’t need the attention. This is who they are. Google has only once honored Easter and that was in 2000. Must have been a slow year for Marxists.
Glenn Beck got it right as so many did on Twitchy:
Ben Shapiro at Breitbart had this to say:
This is not the first time that Google has chosen to honor leftists over tradition. Back on July 4, Google plastered the words “This Land Was Made For You And Me” in its logo, in honor of Communist fellow-traveler Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land. On Christmas, Google featured a holiday-themed logo that popped up this window: “Happy Holidays from Google!”Remember, Obama, the Department of Education and the Common Core Standards are teaching in our schools that Cesar Chavez is a “hero of the people.” Only if you are Marxist is this true. And now you see the U.S. government in true fascist style, place ideologues over faith. Every time I see pictures such as Cesar Chavez or more commonly Barack Obama’s arrogant visage, I see snapshots of Stalin, Mao, Lenin and Hitler in my mind’s eye. The faces have changed, but not the
Google can, and likely will switch out to an Easter logo sometime today. But as millions of Christians return home from Easter vigil on the holiest day of their calendar, they are currently being greeted by Cesar Chavez in a white suit.
http://www.trevorloudon.com/2013/03/google-honors-cesar-chavez-on-easter/
PK'S NOTE: You may be asking why this is an issue. This is TAXPAYER MONEY.
American Jobs, Chinese Profits
Export-Import Bank extends loan to support Chinese-owned solar panel manufacturer
The deal comes amid criticism of the bank’s support of foreign competition to American businesses and accusations of cronyism.
Ex-Im approved a loan to an Indian developer who wants to buy solar panels from MiaSolé, a California-based solar panel manufacturer. A bank spokesman said the loan amount has not been issued yet, as the financing terms are still under negotiation.
The private Chinese energy firm Hanergy bought the struggling MiaSolé late last year. MiaSolé’s board first sought $1.2 billion, but Hanergy paid only one-tenth of that, the New York Times reported.
MiaSolé has developed a “thin film” solar panel that uses a unique chemical compound to capture energy more efficiently. Hanergy indicated it would make panels using MiaSolé’s technology in a plant in China in addition to continuing MiaSolé’s California operations, the Times wrote.
President Barack Obama has pledged to compete with the Chinese for markets in green energy technology.
“As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we,” the president said in his 2013 State of the Union address.
Hanergy’s acquisition of MiaSolé brings it into direct competition with American thin film solar panel manufacturers such as First Solar, one of the biggest manufacturers of thin-film solar panels, and Solopower.
A First Solar spokesman declined to comment for this article. SoloPower could not be reached for comment.
Ex-Im has come under fire in the past for supporting foreign competitors to American businesses, most recently in last year’s legislative fight over the bank’s reauthorization.
An Indian competitor of Delta Airlines bought Boeing airplanes with financing help from Ex-Im, leading Delta to campaign against the bank’s reauthorization on the grounds that it was helping its competitors. Delta claimed to have to drop its direct flight from New York to Mumbai because it could not compete with the Indian airline’s prices.
Congress reauthorized the bank but only under the stipulation that the treasury secretary begins to negotiate with foreign countries to reduce finance subsidies.
An Ex-Im spokesman said the ownership of the manufacturing company does not factor into the bank’s decision to offer financing.
“The ownership of the company is not relevant to the decision to approve financing; the export products or services for which Ex-Im provides financing, however, must be produced and exported by U.S. workers,” Ex-Im spokesman Phil Cogan wrote in an email.
He noted that Ex-Im supports the export of many companies who are manufacturing in the United States but not owned by Americans.
While MiaSolé and Ex-Im announced the financing and sale only recently, the deal appears to have been finalized well before Hanergy acquired the California manufacturer. A source close to the company indicated that MiaSolé’s export sale to the Indian company was finalized in June 2012, with the panels shipped in July and August. Hanergy committed to the acquisition in September 2012 and the buy was finalized in December, the Times reported.
Before Hanergy bought it, MiaSolé had attracted investments from the politically connected firm Kleiner Perkins. Failed presidential candidate Al Gore and former presidential adviser John Doerr are partners at Kleiner Perkins. Doerr is listed as Kleiner Perkins’s managing partner for MiaSolé.
The Times reported that MiaSolé’s investors—primarily venture firms like Kleiner Perkins—invested more than $550 million in the firm. It is unclear what, if any, role they have with the company after Hanergy’s purchase.
Doerr’s office said he was unavailable for comment because he was traveling outside of the country.
Ex-Im president and board chairman Fred Hochberg is a prolific Democratic donor and Obama bundler.
The board would not have directly approved the loan in support of MiaSolé and Hanergy because the board only reviews and approves financing over $10 million. The loan in this case was $9 million dollars.
This loan is not the first time that MiaSolé’s customers have received assistance from the federal government. Another Indian buyer of its panels received a $3.7 million dollar loan from the Ex-Im in 2010.
Ex-Im’s charter mandates that the bank support American jobs by supporting American-made exports through financing.
While the banks ultimately backs the financing it offers with the “full faith and credit of the U.S. Government,” Cogan emphasized that the bank has a loss rate far below most private institutions, and it uses revenue to cover the losses it does incur.
Ex-Im’s charter further mandates that the bank not displace the private financing market, and the bank determines if it the applicants for its financing actually need government-backed financing.
MiaSolé and Hanergy’s fortunes may be looking up, however. MiaSolé recently announced that it planned to double the employment at its Santa Clara location by hiring 200 people. Ex-Im’s announcement attributed the company’s growth to its “growing export business.”
http://freebeacon.com/american-jobs-chinese-profits/
3 Reasons the U.N.'s Arms Treaty Is Useless
It sounds nice to say there could be a treaty that would make all nations responsible when it comes to their arms exports. Of course, it's also impossible.
The latest draft of the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which would regulate imports and exports of arms around the world, failed on Friday after a two-week negotiating conference.
Many media reports have said that Iran, North Korea, and Syria were the reasons the treaty failed. But Heritage senior research fellow Ted Bromund was at the conference and reported that, in reality, 29 nations voiced opposition. "All in all, about one in five of the nations at the conference did not back the treaty," Bromund said.
And it's not over yet—the U.N. General Assembly is still likely to vote the treaty into being this week. Unfortunately, the U.S. is likely to vote for it in the Assembly.
The U.S. has no business validating such a meaningless document. The ATT is useless for many reasons, including:
1. Bad guys won't play by the rules. Dictators have no interest whatsoever in being responsible exporters of arms. Instead, they want to protect their rights as importers. That means that they want a treaty that guarantees them the right to buy guns while decreasing the possibility of armed rebellion by their own oppressed people.
The idea that having a treaty would stop dictators, terrorists, and others bent on violence is wishful thinking. But U.N. treaties treat democracies and dictatorships equally.
2. The ATT focuses mainly on those who export arms, instead of arms importers. As Bromund says, "This is in line with the tendency of both the U.N. and uncritical believers in arms control to blame problems on weapons, not on those who use them. Yet it is the importers of the arms, not the exporters or the arms themselves, that are actually responsible for arming terrorists or committing human rights violations with the arms in question."
Many African nations say they need an ATT to stop arms smuggling. But it's African governments that do a lot of the smuggling. As Bromund said, "listening to dedicated arms smugglers like Kenya, South Sudan, and Rwanda moan about how they need the treaty to save them from arms smuggling is enough to make you sick."
3. The treaty still omits the right of individual self-defense. Bromund has explained that the ATT is not a simple "gun grab," but it's based on the idea that only governments have an inherent right to own firearms. That's one reason why the ATT doesn't recognize American citizens' Second Amendment rights. Restricting the supply of firearms to private citizens is also something dictators like, because they want to prevent armed opposition to their regimes.
As the world's most responsible arms exporter, the U.S. has no need to sign on to this international charade. At least some of America's leaders seem to have caught on, since opposition to the ATT is now at an all-time high in the Senate. We can hope this has a bearing on President Obama's decision when it comes time to sign.
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/04/01/3-reasons-un-arms-trade-treaty-is-useless/?roi=echo3-15087100804-12075241-5024135a9854ddfa3f4eff14f13cc77b&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Iran: 2013 will be 'fall of American empire'
The “American empire” will fall this year, the head of Iran’s Basij forces claimed Sunday, a message that was approved by the Islamic regime’s supreme leader.“America should not think that with some diplomatic dialogue it can solve its dossier (problem) with the nation of Iran,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi said. “The path of this land is directed by the martyrs. America with its hollow slogans … thinks the Iranian nation will believe it.”
The Basij commander was speaking to an audience of the 10th conference of “Journey of Enlightened Land” commemorating the “martyrs” of the eight-year war with Iraq, according to the Journalist Club, an outlet run by the Revolutionary Guards intelligence division.
Naghdi called President Obama’s actions deceitful, saying, “Obama in letters sent to the Islamic Republic promised to put an end to the Iranian nuclear dossier but … reacted in a different way.”
As reported in January 2012, Iranian officials revealed the contents of an Obama letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that indicated a deep desire by the U.S. president for a dialogue with the radical leaders of Iran. Iranian officials also claimed that a subsequent oral message by Obama delivered through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran was even more revealing than the letter delivered to the Iranian supreme leader.
Hossein Ebrahimi, the vice chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said last year that in a meeting between Swiss Ambassador Livia Leu Agosti and Iranian Foreign Ministry officials, Agosti informed the Iranian officials that Obama recognizes Iran’s right of access to and use of nuclear technology.
Ebarhimi also disclosed another important point that the Swiss diplomat delivered: Obama said that “I didn’t want to impose sanctions on your central bank, but I had no options but to approve it since a Congress majority had approved the decision.”
The Basij commander called Obama the most seditious president in the history of America: “Within this period, nothing but betrayal has been witnessed by Obama as the president of America. … America with its enmity toward Iran … has surrounded the country with sanctions.” Under the supreme leader’s request, Naghdi warned that “The epic political movement this year will be the fall of the American empire and the revealing of its true face of cruelty by its politicians.”
Naghdi was born in Iraq and moved to Iran after the Iranian Revolution, joining the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He later joined the Quds Forces, which is involved in international terrorism.
In October 2009, Khamanei appointed Naghdi to command the Basij paramilitary forces. Naghdi has been sanctioned by the U.S. as a violator of human rights for having participated in the suppression of the Iranian people.
Naghdi previously had threatened to kill American generals in response to the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.
He said at the time, “We will mark the hanging sites of the American and Zionist generals and we will identify which hanging was in retaliation for the blood of our great martyr.”
At Sunday’s ceremony, Naghdi, as promised, presented “The Wet Gunpowder” award to first lady Michelle Obama. The award is given to those who “unknowingly and unwillingly” have contributed greatly to the Islamic Revolution. The prize was sent to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran to be handed over to American officials for delivery to Mrs. Obama.
http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/iran-2013-will-be-fall-of-american-empire/
The Stone and Kuznick Roadshow: Why Their Message Must Be Answered
This past Friday, I attended the Oliver Stone-Peter Kuznick roadshow at its Washington, D.C., venue — the national conference of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association, held in the grand ballroom of the Washington Marriott-Wardman Park Hotel. (It was once an apartment complex, in which Henry A. Wallace lived when he was vice president during FDR’s presidency. Kuznick evidently was not aware of this; he might have dedicated the venue as a shrine.)
Their presentation, offered to a clearly leftist and liberal audience that greeted them as conquering heroes waging a battle against the supposedly right-wing establishment, was important for one major reason. It offered us insight into the mindset held by leftists such as the two presenters, and into how they depict themselves in order to gain an audience’s sympathy — how they make them believe their message is the sole truth.
Before it started, I, Roger Aronoff of Accuracy In Media, and historian Richard Raack stood outside the door handing out announcements of our own counter-session to be held the next morning, at which we intended to — and did — offer a rebuke to the Stone-Kuznick book and TV series [1]. Attached to the announcement was my own Weekly Standard article [2] that offered a critique of the first episodes of the Showtime program.
I haven’t leafleted anything as an act of protest in many a year, and believe me, it felt good. I only hope that many who took the leaflets actually took the time to read my article.
Following is what both Stone and Kuznick had to say, and my comments about what I learned from listening to them.
Kuznick, who did most of the talking, announced that they showed the episode about the origins of the Cold War. This is the one which ended with Henry A. Wallace: Kuznick pointed out once again that had Wallace been president instead of Harry S. Truman, the United States would have avoided the Cold War, turned to the left domestically, and had generations of peace with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Kuznick made this argument despite it having been answered in detail not only by me in various publications including PJM, but by Sean Wilentz [3] in the New York Times Review of Books.
Kuznick simply ignored all of the detailed critiques of their argument, as if they had never been made, as if he and Stone had nothing to respond to.
Knowing full well that their audience probably had not read the critiques and had no knowledge of whether anyone had answered them, Kuznick was able to claim in his best voice that he alone dared to tell this truth about Wallace which no one else had ever dared to say.
He placed great emphasis on the phony story of how the Democratic convention of 1948 almost nominated Wallace but was stopped by party bosses — by the way, a story torn apart by Wilentz — and of how Wallace stood for peace while no one else did.
Kuznick ignored as well the evidence of Wallace’s covert meeting with the NKVD station chief in Washington, D.C., while he was still in the president’s cabinet.
Nothing was offered that would contradict the narrative both were sticking with — facts be damned. Both Stone and Kuznick understand that gullible audiences who know nothing will think they are telling the truth.
Next, they used a second ploy: playing the victim.
This time it was Oliver Stone’s turn to talk. Stone actually expected the audience to believe that they were two truth-tellers who had no podium with which to make their case. The media was controlled by the right wing, he said, and they had to battle against a media that essentially blacklisted them and in which they never could have a voice.
Did Stone really believe this? Especially if, as we will see, the evidence he bragged about literally denigrated his own argument?
He failed to mention that both he and Kuznick have been on scores of major TV and radio talk shows to hype their project. Indeed, they have been universally received as brave soldiers for the truth — even on conservative programs like Mike Huckabee’s radio show.
Not only has the media not avoided them, its bookers have bombarded them with endless opportunities to peddle the Showtime series [4] and their book.
Next, Stone informed the audience that when Showtime’s repeat of the series comes to an end, the contract with them is up. At that time, Time Warner will pick up the series, and will release it on their cable systems in major cities as well as on DVD for purchase and for use in college courses. Since Showtime is a cable network and Time Warner is a cable service, he emphasized, it now would get a much wider audience than it did while aired only on Showtime’s premium cable service.
In addition, Stone told us that the program is set to air next week in Britain. “The British are anti-Soviet,” Stone said, “and it might be harder for their audience to accept it, but we’ll see.”
With those words, Stone revealed that being anti-Soviet is to him a very bad thing, and that he finds it hard to believe in this day and age that anyone could ever have had such a position.
Not only was the program to be aired in Britain, he informed us, but it was soon to premiere in both China and Turkey! It did not occur to Stone, evidently, why both of these nations might want to air a program whose main thesis is that American imperialism is an evil result of a vicious American empire that wants to rule the world and hold down “progressive” nations like Communist China, with its state-controlled media, and Islamist Turkey.
Most of the Q and A was handled by the on-stage moderator, who was friendly to both of them and asked them softball questions meant to not challenge them. At one point, she asked them how the series and book were received, to which Kuznick replied that they had overwhelmingly favorable responses from TV reviewers, and that the book had received blurbs from respected mainstream historians who all said how essential and important it was.
Kuznick, of course, knows full well that the blurbs are all from left-leaning scholars, all of whom have the same point of view he has, and none are from any truly mainstream historians like John Gaddis of Yale University, Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University, or others who, if asked, would more than likely think their book a farce, as does Wilentz and David Greenberg of Rutgers University.
At that point, Kuznick went on to say that there was some criticism from “defenders of the American Empire” – he mentioned Wilentz in particular, whom he blasted as being in the same school as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the late highly regarded historian who, of course, was of the broad mainstream left, but whom Kuznick termed a “Cold War liberal,” to leftists a derogatory term.
He went on to say: “These Cold War liberals have joined conservatives in attacking us,” thereby putting his critics in one bag, all defenders of — as he said more than once — “the American Empire.” Indeed, he added that “Wilentz, like Schlesinger, defends the American Empire.” That, I guess, is one way of dealing with the devastating blast that Wilentz had written.
At that moment, I had had enough. I stood up — I shouted in a loud voice but without a microphone, and perhaps only those in my immediate area heard all I had to say – and made known that one of the critics he was attacking was right there. I said that both of them were liars and cowards who refused to debate, that everything they were saying was false and could be answered. I urged those in attendance to come to our session the next morning, as it would provide a major criticism of the arguments they were listening to and which they saw in the episode that had just been screened.
At first, there was total silence, and looks of confusion on Stone and Kuznick. Then Stone proceeded to start talking as if nothing had happened, and did not comment at all on what I had said.
It is more than clear, after attending this lecture, that on the issue of history Kuznick is the sole culprit.
Stone talks largely on how he decided to deal with doing the film — dispensing with talking heads and using footage bolstered by his own stentorian voice, using music and other emphasis at various points to show approval or disapproval of what was depicted in the footage used.
On the issue of historical truth, he again gave his usual pitch that the film had been thoroughly vetted for accuracy. Although one thinks he must really know that CBS lawyers do not go over a film for its treatment of history, but only to see that nothing libelous is said about any living figure. If one could sue for distortion of history, I guarantee that there would be a lot of people standing in line to bring charges.
When asked later what he hoped to get out of the series and book, he answered that “our hope is that our book replaces all existing college textbooks.”
He mentioned that some professors already were assigning it as the textbook for their classes. Kuznick added that even Stone’s daughter used a textbook that said the bombing of Hiroshima was necessary and was done to save American lives.
Finally, the moderator said that there would be a few questions from the audience in the remaining time. Most of course were approving, but one stood out for me because of the answer Kuznick gave to the question: What did they think, the two were asked, of Kim Jong-Un’s warlike blustering and his threat of using force against South Korea and even brandishing the threat of using nuclear weapons?
Any rational person, of course, would immediately condemn North Korea’s current dangerous actions.
Not the two of them, however.
Kuznick replied that although he did not approve of what Kim Jong-Un and the North Koreans were doing, “it was understandable because it was a response to the United States military actions aiding South Korea in recent days.”
He then went on a tirade about how the U.S. decimated both South and North Korea in the days of the Korean War, used napalm as they did later in Vietnam, and generally harmed the people of Korea, something that he thought the North Koreans well remembered, which is why they view the United States and the South Koreans in a hostile fashion.
As usual with leftist ideologues, any bad things said by Communist rulers is excused and explained as a just or understandable response to American aggression. Clearly, to both men, the U.S. is “the evil empire.”
The next morning, we appeared to a rather small group at our counter-session. I was pleased that those who came did so because they got our leaflet, and there were defenders of Stone and Kuznick with whom I was able to argue with and show at length how they distorted history to use it as a vehicle to implement a leftist political agenda.
The video of our session will be available soon at the AIM website [5], and I will add a link to this post when it appears in a week or so.
As I have argued before, in the presentation you can see at Frontpagemag.com [6], winning the fight for the culture is a critical issue. Once Stone and Kuznick get their essentially old-line Communist film into all regular cable outlets and the book is adopted as a text, it will begin to have the same insidious effect that Howard Zinn’s propagandist screed had on high schools students as well as young college students.
The goal of Stone and Kuznick is to distort our history in order to indoctrinate students and to turn them into opponents of the United States — essentially, to create a new generation of activists who will help bring down the free nation we live in.
To them, history is not a tool to understand our past, but a mechanism of indoctrination in which lies — about the Cold War, in this case — are used to turn the young against their own country. That is why opposing them is important, and why we cannot stop in waging the fight against those who help spread their lies only because they see money in it.
Lenin famously quipped that the Bolsheviks would “sell the capitalists the rope with which we will hang them.” In sponsoring Stone and Kuznick’s lies, Showtime and now Time Warner are proving Lenin prophetic.
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/03/31/the-stone-and-kuznick-road-show-and-why-their-message-has-to-be-answered/?print=1
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