Reflections On The Black Panthers

A look back at what the Black Panthers did to deserve Beyoncé's rousing tribute at the Super Bowl.

John Perazzo
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
February 10, 2016

Beyonce performs onstage during the Pepsi Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show.

(Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images)


Beyoncé Knowles. Everyone knows her simply as Beyoncé, the multi-talented superstar wife of music-industry legend Jay Z. She's also the glamorous and magnetic “Bey,” as President Barack Obama affectionately calls her. She's held fundraisers for the President, performed at the White House, and cultivated a warm friendship with both Mr. and Mrs. Obama. Beyoncé often turns up at NBA basketball games, where she and her hubby can typically be seen in their courtside seats, soaking up the love of starstruck fans, broadcasters, and ballplayers alike. This past Sunday, as part of the Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé put on a performance that served as an ode to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. Her all-black female backup dancers proudly donned the Panthers' signature black berets atop their '60s Afro hairstyles, and emphatically raised their fists in the Panthers' famous Black Power salute. In light of the passion with which so many screaming youngsters in attendance rocked and gyrated orgasmically to Beyoncé's every move and word, it's worth taking a moment to consider exactly who the Black Panthers were, and what did they do to deserve such a tribute from the lovely Bey.

The Black Panther Party was born as an outgrowth of the Oakland, California street gang of Huey Newton, a 24-year-old man whose only prior discernible achievements had been as a vicious thug, thief, and pimp. To define the Panthers' mission, Newton in 1966 drafted a Ten-Point Program charging that because America's “racist government” had collaborated with “the capitalists” to “rob” the “Black Community” blind, that same government was now morally “obligated,” as a form of restitution, to give all blacks “employment or a guaranteed income” as well as taxpayer-funded “land, bread, housing, education, [and] clothing” until the end of time. Moreover, Newton argued that “all Black people should be released from … jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.” He also issued a call for blacks to “arm themselves for self-defense,” which was in fact an incitement to a race war. As Panther “minister of culture” Emory Douglas put it in 1970: “The only way to make this racist U.S. government administer justice to the people it is oppressing, is … by taking up arms against this government, killing the officials, until the reactionary forces … are dead, and those that are left turn their weapons on their superiors.”

In a similarly impassioned speech in the late Sixties, Panther member David Hilliard
 denounced “racist, fascist America” as a loathsome country “run by a slave oligarchy and brigandish criminals.” He condemned contemporary white people and their collective forefathers as “genocidal murderers,” “enslavers,” and “exploiters” of the lowest order. And for good measure, Hilliard dismissed “the whole damn” Constitution as a document that was “invalid in regards to Blacks in particular.”


Black Panther Party founders Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton standing in the street, armed with a Colt .45 and a shotgun.


Portraying law-enforcement officers as the indisputably racist agents of a racist nation, the Panthers regularly tried to defy and provoke police—“pigs,” as they contemptuously called them—by appearing in public places carrying loaded firearms. On May 2, 1967, for instance, more than two-dozen Panthers brandishing guns famously walked into a meeting of the California State Assembly to protest a proposed piece of legislation. Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver acknowledged years later (in 1986): “We [Panthers] would go out and ambush cops, but if we got caught we would blame it on them and claim innocence.”

Of course, ambushing the police wasn't the only thing the Panthers knew how to do. They also perfected the fine arts of dealing drugs, pimping prostitutes, extorting money, stealing property, beating people senseless, and on at least a dozen occasions, committing homicide. In 1969 alone, Panther members were arrested 348 times for murder, armed robbery, rape, and burglary. How often did they commit these and other serious crimes without getting arrested? That's anybody's guess.

Because the Panthers hated America, they naturally detested capitalism and revered Communism. David Hilliard, for one, lauded the many graces of “Marxism-Leninism.” Eldridge Cleaver once wrote that “if you look around the world, you will see that the only countries which have liberated themselves and managed to withstand the tide of counter-revolution are precisely those countries that have strongly Marxist-Leninist parties.” The Panthers made Mao Zedong's iconic Red Book required reading for all their members, and sold copies of it to students at UC Berkeley to raise funds for the purchase of shotguns. And for guidance in how to establish revolutionary socialism in the United States, the Panthers studied the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Frantz Fanon. Historian John Patrick Diggins writes that the Panthers “adopted a 'Marxist-Leninist' amalgam that succeeded in combining nationalism with socialism, preaching self-determination along with class struggle.”

The Panthers maintained that blacks were little more than prisoners of an “internal colony” in America, a colony whose liberation could be effectuated only by armed revolution. Tom Hayden, the New Left radical who founded the Students for a Democratic Society and fully expected that a race war would soon engulf the United States, admiringly dubbed the Panthers as “America's Vietcong”—likening them to the Communist guerrillas who were killing U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. In September 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Panthers as the single “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Much more recently, historian Ronald Radosh described them as “a group of Stalinist thugs who murdered and killed both police and their own internal dissenters.” And in a Sixty Minutes interview in 1997, none other than Eldridge Cleaver conceded: “If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.”

These, then, were the Black Panthers. These were the anarchic, murderous barbarians whom Beyoncé chose to honor as voices of “justice” during her insipid Super Bowl halftime performance. It was nothing more, and nothing less, than the grotesque glorification of racism—a politically correct brand.

Tags: Black Panthers, Racism, super bowl

Republicans fail to scream at the lunacy of drafting women

By Rich Lowry
http://nypost.com/opinion/
February 8, 2016

In the blink of an eye, we’ve gone from opening combat jobs to women to Republican presidential candidates endorsing registering women for a draft.

Hide your daughters — our deluded and cowardly political elites are a clear and present danger to common sense.

A proposal from the chief of staff of the Army and the commandment of the Marine Corps to require that women register with the Selective Service seemed at first like an effort to highlight the absurd end point of the rush to put women in combat, but top Republicans duly saluted and fell in line.

Asked about the proposal at the recent Republican debate, Marco Rubio said that “Selective Service should be opened up for both men and women in case a draft is ever instituted.” He makes it sound as though women would completely miss out should a large-scale conventional war break out and they not be compelled to fight in it through the coercive power of the state.

Chris Christie agreed. So did Jeb Bush, who gamely — and cluelessly — added that “we should not impose any kind of political agenda on the military.”

Of course, a political agenda — namely the insistence there is no meaningful difference between men and women, even when it comes to military combat — is the entire point.

The same people who tend to think that college girls need safe spaces to protect them from unwelcome speech profess to believe that their ranks are bristling with the likes of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the legendary Soviet World War II sniper.

They are indulged in this illusion by men with ribbons on their chests who should know better. The US military doesn’t exist to satisfy the whims of the board of directors of the Ms. Foundation. Its job is to field a force that is most effective at winning the nation’s wars.

In an extensive study, the US Marine Corps concluded that mixed-gender units fail by that test, although no one is inclined to take note.

The Marine study compared all-male and mixed-gender units and concluded that women in mixed-gender units “were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons, and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield.”

The physical capacity of the sexes is different, and top-end females tend to be only as capable of the lower-end males. The males in the Marine study averaged 178 pounds, with 20 percent body fat, whereas females were 142 pounds with 24 percent body fat.

The top 25 percent of females in anaerobic power overlapped with the bottom 25 percent of males; the top 10 percent of females in anaerobic capacity overlapped with the bottom 50 percent of males.

The physical disadvantage meant that women were more likely to be fatigued and suffer stress fractures. Women were six times more likely to be injured in entry-level training than males.

The rejoinder to such inconvenient facts is always that the Russians and the Israelis deployed or deploy women in combat. But this is much too simplistic.

Lyudmila the sniper was an exception. According to a study for the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, even under the extreme pressure of the Nazi invasion, women were only 8 percent of the Red Army, and largely served as medics or otherwise in medical care.

As for the Israelis, women initially fought with the Haganah guerrilla force prior to the creation of the Jewish state. But they were pulled back over time.

“Generally,” the Fort Leavenworth study notes, “because of their comparative lack of physical strength, commanders employed women in defensive operations whenever possible.”

Today, as The New York Times notes in a report on gender integration of the Israel Defense Forces, “it remains rare for women to kill or be killed.”

It is evidently too much to ask that reality intrude on the polite fictions of this country’s policy-makers.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

FILED UNDER 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ,  COMBAT ,  MILITARY ,  MILITARY DRAFT ,  REPUBLICANS , WOMEN

Related:

EDITORIAL: Only a Barbaric Nation Drafts Its Mothers and Daughters into Combat

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431007/women-selective-service-republican-candidates

EDITORIAL: The Obama Administration’s Disastrous Decision on Women in Combat

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431007/women-selective-service-republican-candidates

A Super Bowl Sunset

In the twilight of his career, Peyton Manning wasn't the man in Denver’s Super Bowl 50 win, but he didn't need to be. The defense dismantled the Panthers, which left the Broncos QB ‘at peace’ as he weighs retirement. 

by Peter King

http://mmqb.si.com/

February 8, 2016

Manning is the first starting quarterback to win a Super Bowl with two different teams. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — On Thursday, three days before the winningest quarterback in NFL history would play The Last Game (or at least the game we’re sure is the last one), he lined up his offense around the defensive 20-yard line and barked out signals. This would be the last full series of plays in the Super Bowl 50 practice week for Denver at Stanford Stadium, their home for the week … and maybe the last full series of practice plays in Peyton Manning’s life.

The sun was nearly touching the top of the west stands of the stadium on this beautiful California winter afternoon, creating an image of a sunset and lengthening shadows on the field as Manning directed traffic.

“Be alert! Be alert!” he called out, motioning Emmanuel Sanders across the formation. And Manning shouted out the play, which began with “Z Motion!” And then the snap, and then … nothing. No one open.

“One more time!” Manning yelled, annoyed. “Do it again!”

And the offense did, Sanders trolling the back of the end zone and Manning hitting him for a touchdown.

Manning completed 24 of 28 passes against the scout team defense on this temperate afternoon, and his coach, Gary Kubiak, said afterward that this was as good as the 39-year-old Manning had looked all season. Around the Broncos as the week aged, there was growing confidence that Manning could once more have a Manning-of-2013 game.

And then he didn’t.

And then the Broncos won the Super Bowl. By 14.

And then Manning, in the bowels of Levi’s Stadium on Sunday night, was fine with being along for the ride, almost a 2000 Dilfer, on a team with the best defense in the league that absolutely pummeled Cam Newton.

“I’ve just had a real peace this year,” Manning told me 90 minutes after the 24-10 win over the Panthers. “I didn’t know how it was going to work out. I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I’m at the point … I’m okay with that.”

It must be daunting, and it must be a relief, to go from winning like Clayton Kershaw to winning like Mark Buehrle. To be utterly dominant, and then to be along for the ride on a team that hits four home runs every night. The way the Blue Jays pummeled the ball late last season is the way the Broncos’ defense pummeled Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady and Cam Newton in their great playoff run. Denver has a great defense. Holding Big Ben to 16 points, Brady to 18 and MVP Newton to 10? Holding the Steelers, Patriots and Panthers to four touchdowns in 12 quarters? Carolina, New England and Pittsburgh were 1-3-4 in the league in scoring, yet managed all of seven third-down conversions in three games.

Von Miller is the star of this team. He and DeMarcus Ware and two young defensive linemen (Malik Jackson and Derek Wolfe), and a couple of swift linebackers and a strong and physical secondary. Manning can complete 13 of 23 for 141 yards, with two turnovers and a 56.6 rating, and the Broncos can still be the ’85 Bears.

• VON MILLER REACHES THE TOP: He hit bottom two years ago, with a suspension and an injury. After a Super Bowl 50 MVP performance, he’s solidified his status as a franchise player. Next up: a massive payday.

“This is a game Peyton never would have dreamed of playing 10, 12 years ago,” his old coach, Tony Dungy, said Sunday night. “But when you win the Super Bowl, you’re fine with it.”

My theory is Manning, while rehabbing his heel and lifting and getting stronger in the 48 days he was out of the Denver lineup, looked around and realized he didn’t have to throw for 250 anymore for his team to have a chance to win. That was most of the time in Indianapolis, and much of his first two years in Denver. Just don’t make the big mistake, he must be thinking. Punts can be your friends. “I’m buying your theory,” father Archie Manning said Saturday. “I really think he’s fine with it. Look at him. He’s happy. He’s peaceful. I think you have to put this in some perspective. He had four neck surgeries [in 2010 and 2011]. He might never have played again. But playing again, and playing well when he came back—what a blessing.”

But in December, when the rehab was slow and the Broncos were struggling on offense, losing to Oakland and Pittsburgh in succession, Kubiak still was convinced the team was good enough to overcome not knowing if or when Manning would play. “There can still be a fairy-tale ending to this season,” he confided to a friend in December.

And there was, of course. Manning returned to play the second half of the final game, then as a complementary player in both the Pittsburgh and New England wins, all the while having the free world think he was retiring at the end of the year. Which he likely will do. But after talking to Dungy nine days ago, Manning felt convinced he needed to let this moment live without infecting it with the so-called Disease of Me.

• DENVER’S D CRUSHED IT: It was Von Miller, DeMarcus Ware and the defense who made the difference in the Super Bowl 50 win over the Panthers

“I called him,” said Dungy, “and I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do, but if you haven’t decided yet, don’t decide now. Don’t decide at halftime of the last game, or five minutes after the last game. Don’t do it in the moment.’ I think Dick Vermeil made that decision in the moment, and he regretted it. I said, ‘Let the adrenalin wear off and then decide.’”

As Manning said Sunday night, “I thought that was some good advice, to take some time and get away. Coach said, ‘Promise me you’ll do that. It felt like I was back in Indy and he was telling me, ‘Hey, be smart with this ball on third down.’ So it was good advice and I’m going to take some time. But like I said, I have a peace about it either way.”

On Saturday night, Kubiak asked captains Manning and Ware to speak to the team. Ware took a religious tone. “When you walk into the valley of the shadow of death,” Ware said, “you’re not alone.” And he showed images of the offense, the defense and the special teams on the big screen, to emphasize the team aspect of the coming day. Manning did it differently. He talked about the people in the organization, the unsung people they wouldn’t know, or know well. He quoted a favorite pastime of Kubiak’s, the coach’s preference to use “Wise Words” through the year to pass along a lesson. “One of my favorites,” Manning said, “is, ‘Life is fair. Keep working.’” Quarterback coach Greg Knapp said it was the best team-unifying speech he’s heard from a player in his years in football.

“We were ready to play last night,” tight end Owen Daniels said Sunday.

During the day Sunday, when Kubiak saw Manning at the team hotel, he said: “How’d you sleep?”

Manning said, “Like a baby. Ten-and-a-half hours.” Much longer than usual.

Whoa. Maybe the man really was at peace. The game was, in many ways, 1966 football. Quarterbacks playing inefficiently, at least in part because of the ceaseless pressure from both defenses. And it came down to, at the end of the game, Denver trying to play keepaway in a six-point game (Denver, 16-10) the same way the Broncos tried to play keepaway in an eight-point game (Denver, 20-12) in the AFC title game against New England.

Third-and-nine, Denver 26, 5:42 left. Surely Manning would try to convert through the air. No sir. “I thought I saw him change the play to a run,” said Dungy. And Manning did. C.J. Anderson, gain of two. Punt. An incompletion would have taken maybe seven seconds off the clock here. The two-yard run took 43 seconds off. Britton Colquitt punted.

Manning was playing four-corners. He didn’t care. He had Von Miller to strip-sack Newton for the second time moments later, and Anderson scored the clinching touchdown, and Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl without throwing a touchdown pass. He went 3-0 in the postseason and didn’t throw for a touchdown in two of the three wins.

But he has his second Super Bowl title now. And in a day or two, he’ll get away, somewhere no one will find him and his family, and he’ll figure out what to do with his life. At least for now.

“I haven’t decided yet,” Manning said—and he has to know a nation eye-rolls at that. Everyone thinks he’s riding off into the sunset the way Bettis and Strahan and, yes, Elway, have done in the past two decades.

“Ashley and I, we’ll have that talk at some point, but we are going to enjoy this tonight and celebrate. Our kids are four and they are in Pre-K and the teachers say, you really shouldn’t pull them out of school. We are pulling them out! We are going somewhere and we are going to get the heck out of town.

“I have one thing I’ll say, I’ve had good experience with making some decisions, choosing where to go to college, staying for my senior year in college and deciding which NFL team to play for in free agency four years ago. I’ve taken time on all those, I’ve prayed about it, I’ve talked to some people about it and I think I will do that with this. But I have a peace about it whichever way it goes. I’m glad I have been able to get through these two weeks with the focus staying on the team, because that is what it has been about this year. I’ve been a part of it.

“Do you know deep down inside what you are going to do?” I said.

“I don’t,” he said.

But if this is it, and assuming it is, this has been the kind of year Manning has never come close to experiencing as one of the best players ever. Yanked from the lineup. Hurt in midseason. A backup when he returned. Coming back to win a Super Bowl.

“Somebody could say, this year, you really did everything as a QB,” Manning said, sounding wistful. The bus was waiting on him, and he could feel the world waiting for him. For once, he didn’t seem to care.

“I hadn’t been a backup, hadn’t really been injured. I played a long time, but I’d only seen it from one way. I know there are a couple scenarios that I haven’t been in, but I covered a lot of bases this year. Like I said, there is a real perspective to that. And it was really sort of educational for me. You know nobody loves the quarterback position more than me. Today, with the 50th Super Bowl and the league bringing back all the MVPs, I saw Phil Simms and I saw Joe Montana and Steve Young out there on the field before the game. I wanted so badly to find a way to be out there for that MVP picture out there with Eli [his brother] and Tom Brady and Joe Namath. Impossible. There was no way I could do it. But nobody loves quarterbacks more than me and I think I have an even greater perspective and appreciation for the position after this year and I’ve stuck with it. You find out a lot. And it certainly ended up in a real good way today, didn’t it?”

It did. For 53 Broncos and a coaching staff and an organization. An egalitarian Super Bowl, with the quarterback in twilight a part. And the smile on his face, the wide, wide smile, told the story. He was fine with being one of 53, winning a different way. It felt as good.

Denver Defense: ‘We Read Them Like a Book’

by Andy Benoit

http://mmqb.si.com/

February 8, 2016

Denver Broncos’ Von Miller (58) strips the ball from Carolina Panthers’ Cam Newton (1) during the second half of the NFL Super Bowl 50 football game Sunday, Feb. 7, 2016, in Santa Clara, Calif. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — All week long the question was, How would the Broncos react to Cam Newton. Sunday’s answer: they’d make Newton react to them.

“He really doesn’t scramble a whole lot,” defensive coordinator Wade Phillips said, holding the Lombardi Trophy. “He tries to throw from the pocket.”

The Broncos at times dedicated a spy on Newton in situations where he would be more inclined to scramble, but mostly they went into attack mode, blitzing Newton out of their man-to-man packages.

Phillips’ biggest decision heading into this game was what to do with his extra defenders. He knew that in man coverage he’d often have at least one, and maybe two. The Panthers, after all, like to keep a tight end and/or fullback in to help their athletically average offensive line in pass protection. So what do you do with the man-to-man defenders who are assigned to the tight end or fullback?

Phillips’ solution was to have them blitz. This tactic, known as green-dog blitzing, is an aggressive yet relatively safe way to combat a dual threat quarterback like Newton. As long as the green-dog blitzers are patient and sure that their man is not just chip-blocking but actually staying in all the way, and as long as they’re disciplined in their rush lanes so as not to disrupt the four rushing defensive lineman, it can be a lethal approach.

Linebacker Brandon Marshall, who has been a key green-dog blitzer for Denver all season, said this was the plan every time they saw extra men stay in to help pass protect. “In a lot of games we saw on film, Newton was just sitting back, patting the ball,” Marshall said. “We’d see two [free defenders] in the middle of the field just not doing anything.”

Another crucial benefit of green-dog blitzing is it prevents those extra blockers from doing what they’re employed specifically to do, which is help the offensive line. Tight end Ed Dickson can’t help heavy-legged right tackle Mike Remmers with a double team on Von Miller if Dickson has to react to a safety coming after his quarterback. Fullback Mike Tolbert can’t lend a hand to slower-footed Michael Oher against DeMarcus Ware if a linebacker has suddenly pinned his ears back and is rushing.

And often, the Panthers like to have Dickson and Tolbert blocking on the same side so that the entire O-line can slide the other way. By green dog blitzing, that O-line slide gets nullified because the green-dog blitzers become the edge rushers, allowing the D-lineman to run twists and stunts just a few slots over against the sliding blockers.

With this proactive approach, the Broncos turned in one of the most dominant Super Bowl performances in history. The Panthers offense scored a season-low in points (10) and gave up season-highs in turnovers (four) and sacks (seven).

Adding players to the pass rush “flustered them a lot,” said safety T.J. Ward. “They didn’t expect that.”

Ward was asked if the Panthers showed them anything that they didn’t expect. “No. We read them like a book.”

“They did everything we watched on film,” said fellow safety Darian Stewart.

The safeties weren’t the only ones saying this. Marshall, when asked the question, laughed. (Causing linebacker Todd Davis, one locker over, to also laugh.) “They did everything that we saw on film,” Marshall said. “That’s the crazy thing. You’d think with two weeks to prepare for the Super Bowl, they would do a new wrinkle. They did everything the same. Nothing new.”

The only man who could think of any unexpected play from Carolina was, of course, Coach Phillips. He cited the Ted Ginn throwback attempt to Newton (which the Broncos took away) and the misdirection third-and-short throw to Greg Olsen (which got the Broncos).

• DENVER’S D CRUSHED IT: It was Von Miller, DeMarcus Ware and the defense who made the difference in the Super Bowl 50 win over the Panthers.

Besides green-dog blitzing, Phillips’ other big focus was taking away Carolina’s running game. The Panthers, with all of their heavy two-tight end and two-back sets, present a lot of moving pieces on the ground. But they’ll also run the ball out of what’s become the default formation leaguewide: three wide receivers. Phillips noticed something here. “They can’t run against a seven man front with three wide receivers.”

Few teams had exploited Carolina here because defenses often play a six-man front against three-receiver sets if it’s a passing situation. The Panthers are willing to still run in those situations, which concerned Phillips. So, to put an extra body in the front—which was crucial given that Newton must be treated as a ballcarrier—Phillips in certain scenarios replaced one of his nickel safeties with a fifth defensive lineman. That gave the Broncos five men along the line of scrimmage but still three corners in coverage. It’s a brilliant ploy because corners Aqib Talib, Chris Harris and Bradley Roby can easily cover Carolina’s mediocre wide receivers one-on-one. An extra safety wasn’t necessary.

Taking away the run was critical for two reasons: (1) It’s what the Panthers do best; and (2) Stopping it creates the third-and-long situations that allow guys like Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware to tee off on iffy offensive tackles.

Not to mention, Denver felt that Carolina in obvious passing situations was schematically limited. “You can tell they spend more time on their run game than their passing game,” said Ward. “Their run game is intricate, with the hand-offs and the option runs, and guys pulling. Their passing game is pretty much what they show you in their previous weeks.”

And so the team that John Elway built to win via defense has claimed the franchise’s third Super Bowl thanks to a destructive defense. Talent was key, as it always is. But just as important is identifying the most advantageous ways to use the talent. The Broncos did this with tactical aggressiveness in all phases.

Broncos' dominant defense officially superb with Super Bowl win

Broncos defense had held three high-scoring offense ineffective during playoffs

By Woody Paige
The Denver Post

http://www.denverpost.com/broncos

February 7, 2016

Von Miller sacked Cam Newton and ripped the ball free to set up a defensive touchdown for the Broncos. AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Super Crush 50!

The Broncos became the supreme defensive team in NFL postseason history by orange-squeezing three of the league's paramount offensive units — the Pittsburgh Steelers, the New England Patriots and, ultimately, the Carolina Panthers — and constraining Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady and Cam Newton to only three touchdowns, with just one passing.

The trio of offenses that scored a combined 86.8 points per game in the regular season averaged just 11.3 points against the Broncos' Tour de Force.

Super Bowl 50 was the magnum opus for the Broncos, who prevailed over the Panthers 24-10 on Sunday at Levi's Stadium and won their third world championship and first in this millennium.

From Orange Crush in 1977 to, as Super Bowl MVP Von Miller said afterward, "we just wanted to be the Orange Rush."

Miller, who had two strip sacks and an extraordinary performance vs. the Panthers after an astonishing game against the Patriots, led the way as the dynamic, dynamo defense dominated again.

"I'm so proud of my buddies," Miller said. "It feels great. Peyton (Manning) and DeMarcus (Ware) and coach (Wade) Phillips have been deserving their whole careers. I did this for them. I put my neck on the line for those guys."

With Peyton Manning holding on for dear life in his final game (although he would not announce his retirement publicly yet), the offense managed a meager 194 total yards (and one touchdown), but the defense, as it has done all season in 15 victories, took command by scoring its own touchdown, setting up the final touchdown, causing four turnovers (three fumbles and an interception), sacking Newton six times (and Ted Ginn Jr. on a thwarted trick play) and incessantly harassing the Panthers' quarterback, who felt like he was trapped in a waffle maker, just as it did Brady two weeks before.

The Broncos produced one of the 10 best defensive performances in Super Bowls, and analytical experts proclaim this modern-day, updated Orange Crush as one of the top five ever. Their run through the postseason has to be No. 1, according to this guy, who has seen the Seahawks and the Ravens and 41 others.

It is interesting to note that the second overall selection in the 2011 draft, Miller, ran rampant against the No. 1 pick that year, Newton.

Manning has won two of four Super Bowls. His boss, John Elway, won two of five and finished with back-to-back victories. Now, Elway has become one of the pre-eminent NFL general managers with two Super Bowls in five years. He picked Miller; he assembled the game's most proficient offense in 2013 and football's premier defense in the 2015 season. Most valuable player to most valuable executive.

Miller finished with 2½ sacks, two forced fumbles, six tackles and a pass defense way down field.

The league's two superlative defensive teams gave the world a defensive game. The Panthers were able to convert third downs into first downs only 3-of-15 occasions (20 percent), and the Broncos were just 1-of-14 (7 percent). The Panthers had 18 first downs by pass and rush, the Broncos nine. There were barely 500 yards total offensive yards by both. Newton was the Panthers' only rusher to surpass 30 yards.

C.J. Anderson toughed out 90 yards — one for 34 — on 23 carries, punctuated by the one 2-yard touchdown with 3:08 remaining that finally determined that the Broncos would win.

Until then, the outcome certainly was indefinite.

The two offenses were juggernauts.

Denver did little; Carolina did less. At halftime the Broncos were up 13-7 on two field goals and a fumble recovery in the end zone by Malik Jackson, the other Broncos fellow from the University of Tennessee. The Panthers had their only touchdown drive 4:35 into the second quarter.

They had squadoosh from then until a field goal with 10:21 was left in the fourth quarter, but still were only six points away (16-10).

The Broncos seemed to be playing "four corners" offense for four quarters, and the Panthers obviously were afraid of the Broncos' body-hugging, unyielding defense. Cam couldn't throw or run or hide from the Miller-Ware attack and the blitzing, swarming, crushing defense.

The Panthers' suffered six presnap penalties, as if they didn't want to start any play.

Anderson praised his teammates on the other side of the ball.

"Man, we've got the greatest defense on the planet," he said.

Linebacker Brandon Marshall was more effusive.

"In my opinion, we're the greatest defense to ever play the game. Greatest," he said. "It's a bold statement, but from top to bottom, we have the greatest talent — from (pass) rushers to safeties to linebackers. Better than anybody who's ever done it.

"All we really need is 17 points."

The Broncos got 24.

The Panthers had only 10.

The Broncos have been crushed in Super Bowls by Dallas, the New York Giants, Washington, San Francisco and, two years, ago Seattle.

But the Broncos were the Orange crushers on Super Sunday.

Woody Paige: woody@woodypaige.com or twitter.com/woodypaige

Film Review - 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

By Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/
February 6, 2016


Paramount Pictures

Michael (Transformers) Bay has now made two feature films about real-life military attacks on US sovereign territory - in 2001 Pearl Harbor, which was enough to have you rooting for the Japs, and now 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Happily, the latter does not have much in common with the former, save for a reprise of what evidently Mr Bay regards as his signature - a rocket falling from the skies to its target, but shot from the rocket's point of view. If you object that a rocket is an inanimate object and can't have a point of view, well, it's all comparative: in Pearl Harbor, the rocket was a lot less inanimate than Ben Affleck. Here the director has a grittier and hairier cast, and makes a good-faith if not wholly successful effort to dial back the prettifying devices of blockbuster film-making.

As for the point of view, the rocket has one. But Bay doesn't. This is a visceral, sensory, pulverizing, you-are-there slab of action - all twitchy cameras, sudden edits, jerky cross-cuts - in which the context of the fireballs all around is left for another day. The director describes 13 Hours as "my most real movie", but it doesn't have to be that real to be more real than the official version. Film-making and storytelling have been part of the Benghazi fiasco since the evening of September 11th 2012, when the US Government decided to tell its own story about a film-maker whose all but unseen video had, they insisted, led to the death of a US ambassador. In the Hillary Clinton version, four Americans died at the hands of (as I put it at the time) "a spontaneous class-action movie review". Three days later, when the President, the Secretary of State and the US Ambassador to the United Nations were all still lying to the American people about what happened and why, my characterization of that night holds up better than the Government's:

As Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher's teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That's not a spontaneous movie protest; that's an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower's response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise. 

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a "safe house," and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they've investigated Mitt Romney's press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

In the end, the court eunuchs chose to continue fanning Sultan Barack. Three years later, based on a book by five of the survivors, Bay's film belatedly provides answers to some of the basic questions the media never asked. It's not a political film at all: Hillary is never mentioned by name, and for the whole 13 hours the Government of the United States - indeed, in a more basic sense, the entire global hyperpower - is an unseen character confined to the end of a telephone that no one ever picks up. There are occasional glimpses of nearby assets - a US air base across the Med in Italy - but in this western the cavalry never come. Three years ago we were told that they couldn't have got there "in time" - so, in Hillary's words, what difference would it have made? But as I wrote:

It's easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn't like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it's more like a tennis match: Whether it's all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. Not only did they not deploy out-of-area assets, they ordered even those in Libya to stand down.

That's the story as Bay tells it: For two-plus hours, you feel only the absence of the global superpower - as, indeed, many beleaguered Americans and American allies around the planet have felt these last years. The background is sketched efficiently enough. John Krasinski, the nice bloke from the US version of "The Office", lands in Libya hirsute and bulked up. He's playing Jack Silva, a private security contractor for whom this is just another gig in just another Krappistan. He's met at the terminal by his old Navy Seal buddy Tyrone Woods (James Badge Dale) and even on the drive back from the airport it's clear that Benghazi is a town where the Libyan government's writ doesn't run and turning left instead of right can have serious consequences for your life expectancy. When they run into trouble at an ad-hoc militia checkpoint, Woods has a well-rehearsed line to hand, pointing to the sky and telling the dimestore jihadist that every aspect of the encounter is currently being watched by the all-seeing drone. As we'll discover, the world's first drone superpower sees everything ...but doesn't do anything.

Woods and Silva work for GRS - the Global Response Staff - whose job is to provide security for the CIA operatives in the city. There are six of them, with monosyllabic nicknames - Rone, Tig, Oz, Boon - and a trait apiece: One of them is a bookish type partial to Joseph Campbell, which provides Bay with some voiceovered philosophical musings in the final moments. Otherwise, this is where the director descends to his traditional caricatures: in contrast to the hairy muscular tattooed GRS guys, the CIA types are clean-cut pocket-pen pansy-assed snooty desk-jockeys with Ivy League Master's in Nation-building Studies, all under the command of a Head of Station jobsworth called "Bob" (David Costabile) on his last posting before retirement. Because there are no girls in this story, one of the CIA agents is female, a thankless role well-played by Alexia Barlier.

The pointyheads don't want these dumb lummoxes causing any trouble. When the CIA occasionally ventures out from its crusader fort to meet with local bigwigs, Jack goes along as protection, posing as Mlle Barlier's hubby, but sneeringly instructed not to say a word. In the course of the film, Mlle Barlier's character comes to see that, when the chips are down, you need these hard men. Whereas the dweebiest of the desk-jockeys, on being instructed to grab a gun and head to the roof, responds, "He's joking, right?"

This is the CIA we're talking about, remember. They can't really be that effete and disconnected, can they? They surely can't have that little sense of their vulnerability - of their precarious toehold on a disintegrating landscape. Next door to their compound itinerant herders graze sheep and doe-eyed boys skim stones, but there seems to be a method in their comings-and-goings, as if it's the intelligence agency that's under surveillance. A mile away, inside the diplomatic compound, things are even more surreal. There's a pool, and the lobby looks like the Benghazi Hyatt, but the State Department security are rank amateurs and their local guards are unarmed and the foreigners lack the language skills ever to be entirely sure about the natives they've hired. As one American marvels, after watching his militia comrade on his cellphone, the so-called good guys mysteriously have the bad guys on speed-dial.

The "friendlies" fade into the shadows, the "hostiles" metastasize: As the night unfolds, you get the sense that everyone - the goatherds, the grease-monkeys watching TV soccer, their shrouded womenfolk - knows what's going on. Except the Americans. The CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness. The world over the wall has a lazy sensuality, confident that, when the infidels with the guns and the money depart, it will be as if they were never there.

And so on September 11th US Ambassador Chris Stevens (Matt Letscher), described as a "true believer" in the new Libya, arrives for a private meeting with the mayor - at which half the town shows up. Instead of being upset by the security breach, "Bob" is more irked at a GRS guy dozing off during Stevens' happy-sappy remarks. When it all goes pear-shaped back at the compound, Bay is unsparing in showing Stevens' panic and fear at the disintegration of his illusions: He and Sean Smith are hastily shuffled into a "safe room", which, of course, thanks to the attention to detail of the money-no-object State Department, is entirely unsafe. Unable to force their way in, the invading army simply lights up the adjoining room, and the smoke under the door does the rest.

The decision to let their ambassador die appears to have been taken early on. Was it just "Bob" back at the CIA annex rushing into the yard and ordering GRS to stand down? Or did it come from higher up? Half-a-dozen brave men plus a goofy Libyan interpreter decide that, unlike the CIA, they're going to do what's right, and off they set.

The GRS guys are well-cast by Bay. The one misstep is Toby Stephens, playing Glen Doherty. The son of Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, Toby is best known as the baddie in Die Another Day, a very overripe performance even by Bond-villain standards. He enters the picture back at the embassy in Tripoli, when the diplomats are fretting that they have no assets in country. Oh yes you do, says Stephens, stepping forward and fixing his gimlet eye on the camera: "I need a bagful of money and a flight to Benghazi." His face is too strong and his presence too actorly and the line too portentous, and just for a moment the entire enterprise trembles on the brink of Robert Stack in Airplane!

Glen Doherty was a singularly brave man. He was the guy who didn't shrug "What difference does it make?" And so he made a difference: He got his flight, and he landed in Benghazi in the early hours, and made it to the roof of the compound to save American lives, and sacrifice his own. While the commander-in-chief went off to party in Vegas, and the Secretary of State put her phone on voicemail, and the UN Ambassador hit the TV circuit to peddle the official lie, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods chose to act in defiance of the government that abandoned them. Bay does not eschew the conventions of the genre, but Lorne Balfe's hitherto percussive score finds an appropriate dignity for these final scenes.

We all know how the story ends, as perhaps they did, too, in the last of those 13 hours. It was a thankless task, a charge of the Light Brigade necessitated by the absence of all the heavy power. But they did it, and their sacrifice deserves to be honored. There are other stories to tell about Benghazi - of self-serving duplicity by shameless hollow nothings unfit for public office - but Michael Bay has chosen to focus on heroism and sacrifice by men whom too many Americans have forgotten. I hope his film makes a difference.