Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Book Review: ‘Adios, America’ by Ann Coulter

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On June 16, 2015 @ 12:09 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 23 Comments
aa[1]Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Most bad policies are bipartisan. Democrats come up with them and Republicans sheepishly implement them. Amnesty is one of the few bad policies that Republicans desperately try to claim as their own.

Amnesty is a sinkhole of corrupt interests, from businesses looking for cheap labor to Democrats looking for cheap votes, and panic by fossilized political entities like the NAACP, unions and the Republican Party; eager to surrender out of fear that they will be be left behind by the demographic future.

Those who oppose amnesty tend not to be heard. They are the homeowners watching dangerous men who have crossed the border glower through their windows. They are the black teenagers who can’t even get a fast food entry level job because the illegals are cheaper and more compliant. They are the legal immigrants who left places like El Salvador behind only to find its gang members in their back yard.

And then there are courageous voices like Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Krikorian and, of course, Ann Coulter, who speak for them.

Coulter’s latest book, “Adios, America” is an uncompromising attack on the policies, justifications and rhetoric of amnesty. It’s full of the punchy quotes she’s known for, such as “Americans ought to be suspicious about being told incessantly fences don’t work. It’s like being told wheels don’t work”, accompanied by a broad survey of the entire immigration and illegal immigration debate.

The biggest targets are the latest efforts at amnesty, from the disastrous Republican amnesty effort to Obama’s unilateral legalizations, which have been disguised by Orwellian word games. 
After years of amnestiers claiming that their amnesty isn’t really amnesty, she lays out the simple fact that “Any law that forgives an illegal act, in whole or part, is an amnesty.”

The refusal to use the A-word is a sign of nervousness about public support for amnesty and Coulter targets the assorted polls that claim that the public supports it for being dishonest and misleading.

Going back in time, “Adios, America” takes a look at Ted Kennedy’s Third World immigration push and the Clinton voter mill. It argues that traditionally American voters have been displaced by tribal cultures that are uninterested and unwilling to adapt to life in this country with the inevitable accompanying costs for social services and the criminal justice system created by their ongoing presence.

Coulter covers everything from the dubious legal basis for anchor babies to the demographic voting argument that has panicked so many Republicans and the economic growth argument that has so often been used dishonestly by the proponents of the former.

As she points out, the vast majority of illegal aliens once legalized will begin collecting between $14,642 and $36,992 from the taxpayer.

“We’re always told that we need to amnesty illegals to shore up Social Security. How, exactly, are people who make so little money that they don’t pay income taxes going to save Social Security?” she asks.

Obviously a hole can’t be filled with another hole. Democrats and Republicans who champion amnesty are promising to plug a demographic hole with an economic hole while vowing that the two holes will somehow balance out; that a generation of elderly taxpayers will be bailed out by a generation of legalized aliens without a diploma working for minimum wage in states going bankrupt funding them.

Coulter challenges the hypocrisy of wealthy amnesty supporters who want to lock in the luxury of cheap labor for their domestic lifestyle and their businesses at the expense of the country and everyone else.

As she notes, “The rich get all the benefits of cheap servants– and they get to look enlightened at the same time.”

She also attacks the civil rights language being hijacked by amnesty supporters, accusing illegal immigrants of displacing black people and hijacking their struggle. Diversity, she notes, mostly ends up meaning Mexican immigrants taking advantage of a non-reciprocal open border and welfare state.

The absurd situation in which the descendants of European colonists become an oppressed minority by virtue of speaking another language is one of the more convoluted pieces of left-wing identity politics. Diversity is selective in its application, holding that Asians at elite colleges and tech companies don’t represent diversity, but that members of a majority group from across the border are truly diverse.

But while “Adios, America” at times appears to act as if this mass migration and transformation is a uniquely American problem; it’s really, with some exceptions like Japan, a First World problem. Europe is being saturated by migrants from Africa and the Middle East with more generous welfare and fewer legal defenses for the natives. Australia is fighting for its life against a tide of migrants. In the UK and Canada, terrorist settlers have more rights than the natives they are killing.

Likewise Coulter’s assessment of Israel’s immigration situation is excessively optimistic based on reports from an alarmist left-wing media. Those same reports applied to the United States would have us believe that Obama is the “Deporter-in-Chief”. Israelis, particularly in South Tel Aviv, live in a state of siege surrounded by migrants and armed gangs who are protected by non-profits and activist lawyers.

And anyone who complains about the situation is denounced as racist.

As May Golan [2], the Ann Coulter of Israel, pointed out the illegals get [3] everything for free while the local residents “look through their peepholes and think twice about going down to buy milk after 5:30.”

Unfortunately, Israel has the same network of left-wing activists whose vocabulary begins and ends with “racism”, business interests who want to hire cheap foreign labor instead of Israelis and politicians who veer between talking tough on illegal inflitrators and rolling out the welfare wagon for them.

As May Golan has said of Israel, “They want this country not to be Jewish anymore.” Illegal migrant advocates in Europe want to eliminate the European character of the UK, France and Sweden.

Amnesty advocates don’t want America to be American. As Coulter notes, that is what diversity really means.

The transnational assumption behind the advocacy for illegal immigration is that the Americans, the French or the Israelis are not entitled to have their country the way they want it, but must bow to a higher international agenda.

And if the locals don’t like it, they can always be displaced and replaced by a new herd of voters who may be a financial burden, but who will always vote the correct way.

That is what is really at stake here.

Taking apart the 11 million figure often bandied about, Coulter contends that it’s more like 30 million and warns that amnesty is the final and ultimate political issue of the Republic.
“If we lose immigration, we lose everything.”

Republicans haven’t been losing the political argument, as she points out; they’ve been losing the demographic one. Even if Republicans could get a 40/60 split of the votes of new immigrants, that would just be a slower death. Politicians who pander on amnesty are just debating the terms on which their party and their country commit suicide.

While conservative European parties have stepped up and argued that in a time of economic turmoil immigration needs to be cut, not increased, the Republican Party has been allergic to such sentiments. When Scott Walker and Rick Santorum boldly called for an immigration policy that favors American workers, they were immediately smeared and attacked by the Republican amnesty lobby.

“Adios, America” is an antidote to the amnesty lobby. It is everything they hate packed into one book and it focuses attention on the issue whose struggle will define the decade and whose outcome will define the next century.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here [4].

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Drug war drama plays out in new novel


By 
http://www.utsandiego.com/
June 14, 2015


Don Winslow — Hayne Palmour IV / U-T
Ten years ago, crime novelist Don Winslow wrote a searing, violent book about the Mexican-American drug wars called “The Power of the Dog” that brought him critical acclaim and a question he avoided for as long as he could:
When are you doing a sequel?
Never. That was his answer. “Dog” was an emotionally wrenching five-year project, 30 years of bloody history steeped in 560 pages of furious energy. He immersed himself in the details of brutal killings and horrific torture, got inside the heads and hearts of DEA agents and drug lords, hit men and hookers.
Writing from the comfort of his home near Julian, he was far from the actual mayhem, but through his research he saw things he didn’t want to see, learned things he didn’t want to know. And when he’d told the story he wanted to tell, he was done.
Done with the vicious cartels, done with the jaded cops trying to stop them, done with America’s appetite for drugs and the harm its insatiability causes in other places.
“Done with the whole subject,” he said.
The sequel comes out June 23.
In the 10 years since Winslow wrote “Dog,” the drug wars have only gotten worse. More guns, more death, more horror, and more numbed indifference on the U.S. side of the border, a shrugging of the shoulders about “Mexico’s drug problem.”
Which, Winslow will tell you, is really America’s drug problem.
So he felt he had some unfinished business, and “The Cartel” is it. At 640 pages, it’s another monster of a novel – big in story, big in ambition. Based on real events, it’s unavoidably violent but not voyeuristic. There is a deep understanding of the bonds and betrayals inherent to the drug trade, considerable musing about the difference between vengeance and justice, and a recognition that even in the face of soul-sapping depravity, there can be nobility and courage.
The book has drawn a lot of early attention, with major newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald) and magazines (Esquire, Entertainment Weekly) putting it on their “must read” lists for the summer.
And while it’s common to see an A-list writer offer a favorable blurb for a colleague, “The Cartel” has a Murderer’s Row of crime-novelists weighing in: James Ellroy, Harlan Coben, Lee Child, Michael Connelly.
“This,” according to Ellroy, “is the ‘War and Peace’ of dope war books. Tense, brutal, wildly atmospheric, stunningly plotted, deeply etched. It’s got the jazz dog feel of a shot of pure meth.”

Changing directions

Winslow, 61, is the author of 18 previous books and the owner of a resume interesting for its diversity of life experiences.
Born in New York, the son of a sailor and a librarian, he grew up in Rhode Island and did some child acting. He got a college degree in African studies in Nebraska (he also has a master’s in military history) and worked as a safari guide in Kenya. He’s herded cattle, managed a movie theater, taught Shakespeare at Oxford and been a private detective on both coasts.
His first novel, “A Cool Breeze on the Underground,” was published in 1991, and he settled into a familiar pattern for authors of his genre: Writing a series featuring the same detective. Five books into it, he grew bored, felt as if he was repeating himself.
“The Death and Life of Bobby Z” (1997) was his breakthrough book, smart and funny and fast-paced. Winslow penned its short chapters while riding the train back and forth between Dana Point, his home at the time, and L.A., where he was working on a PI case.
That novel was so well-received Winslow got a long-term book contract and a movie deal. He and his wife of 30 years, Jean, bought a place near Julian and moved there with their son, Thomas.
When “Power of the Dog” came out in 2005, it raised his profile here and abroad, with several critics likening it to “The Godfather” and calling it a masterpiece. Five years later, Winslow made an even bigger splash with “Savages.”
Feeling ornery about the way crime fiction was being compartmentalized – police procedural, thriller, mystery – he decided to flout the rules, starting with the opening chapter, which was just two words: “(Blank) you.”
Winslow said he knew readers would either toss the book aside or be drawn immediately into his story about two pot-growing friends in Laguna Beach, told in a skittering prose that was a combination of languages and inflections, fragments of thought, and explosive urgency.
The New York Times lauded what it called the Winslow Effect, the author’s ability to “fuse the grave and the playful, the body blow and the joke, the nightmare and the dream.” Oliver Stone turned the book into a movie.
Always at work on new projects – not just books but screenplays, short stories, commentaries, TV scripts – Winslow found himself getting pulled back into following the drug wars. He kept a chronology, based on media accounts and law-enforcement sources, of killings, narcotics arrests and turf battles between drug lords.
The chronology eventually grew to more than 150 single-spaced typewritten pages. In those entries, Winslow said, he began to see patterns, and in those patterns a story he could no longer put off telling.

How much is too much?

Decapitations with chain saws. Mass rapes followed by mass murders followed by mass burials. Bodies put in metal drums and set on fire, bodies hung from bridges, bodies dismembered and then rearranged for public display. And much of it recorded and distributed via the Internet for intimidation and recruiting purposes.
“When I was doing ‘Power of the Dog,’ I thought I had seen the ultimate in violence,” Winslow said. “Tragically, I was wrong.”
The historian in him wanted to bear witness to as many of the killings as possible – his editor sometimes teased him that he was writing a “docu-novel” – but how much horror is too much?
“You either sanitize it or you do it as realistically as you can,” Winslow said. “I chose the latter because I wanted the reader to understand the real human consequences of what we do up here.”
By “what we do up here” he means the billions of dollars Americans spend every year to buy drugs that are transported through Mexico. He means the billions that government agencies spend trying to halt that flow. He means the guns that are bought in the U.S. and wind up south of the border.
“People in America don’t understand what goes on down there,” he said. “And what Americans don’t understand in particular is our role in it. It’s not the Mexican drug problem; it’s the American drug problem. We’re the buyers, we’re the market, so for all the violent headlines that we read about across the border, what we need to understand is we fund it.”
“The Cartel” continues the deadly dance of DEA agent Art Keller and his nemesis, the powerful drug baron Adán Barrera, but it’s filled with at least a dozen key characters. The tale, which spans a decade, gets told through these shifting narrators.
The short chapters that have become a Winslow trademark are gone this time, inappropriate, he said, for a book this big and this serious. (There is some of his familiar snark, though, most of it from a character called Crazy Eddie.)
Winslow dedicated the book to journalists who were murdered or “disappeared” during the period covered in the novel. “These are people who were trying to tell the truth of what was happening,” he said, “and they were killed for it.”
He said he found their dedication and sacrifice inspiring, a bright light during the dark days of writing a novel that was “hard and depressing and infuriating.”
The dedication lists the names one by one, more than 130 of them, filling one page and almost half of another, and ending with this, a chilling reminder of why Winslow decided finally to write the book:
“There were others.”
© Copyright 2015 The San Diego Union-Tribune. All rights reserved.
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Monday, June 15, 2015

A Woman Who Insists She’s African American but Isn’t

By Charles C. W. Cooke — June 12, 2015
http://www.nationalreview.com/
The critics of self-identification as objective truth finally have their test case. Sky News reports:
A prominent civil rights campaigner is being investigated after it was claimed she had falsely portrayed herself as black for almost a decade. 
President of the Spokane, Washington branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Rachel Dolezal reportedly identified herself as part African-American upon applying for her post on the city’s citizen police ombudsman commission. 
But networks including KXLY say public records show her parents are white couple Ruthanne and Lawrence — who subsequently confirmed their daughter is also white. 
Her mother told The Spokesman Review the family had Czech, Swedish and German roots, with “faint traces” of Native American heritage — adding that her daughter began to “disguise herself” in 2006 or 2007. 
“Rachel is very good at using her artistic skills to transform herself,” she told the Coeur d’Alene Press.
Reacting on Twitter, the London Telegraph’s Timothy Stanley was quick to ask what many were thinking. “What,” Stanley inquired, “is the material difference between #RachelDolezal and Caitlyn Jenner?”

Uh oh.

Comparisons such as Stanley’s are commonly made and commonly dismissed out of hand — usually with much rolling of eyes and condescending tut-tutting. In all honesty, I’m never quite sure why. The standard response from the pooh-poohers is that “gender dysphoria” is scientifically recognized but that “racial dysphoria” is not, and that we should therefore decline to compare the two even in passing. But, even if we accept that premise — and frankly, I’m not entirely convinced; Sean Davis andothers are correct when they suggest that “the long-standing ideas of race as a social construct and gender as a biological construct have been flipped on their heads” here — those who are sympathetic to Jenner will still have a practical problem if people do start claiming in earnest that they feel more comfortable pretending to be what they are not. Why? Well, because our present calls for acquiescence are not predicated principally on the integrity of objective truth but on the perceived need to propitiatethe person who is making the claim. On the front line of these battles, science is frankly an afterthought.
When it comes to those who claim that they are what they do not seem to be, calls for acquiescence are not predicated principally on the integrity of objective truth.
Explaining why she had been pretending to be a black woman, Dolezal wrote that “the question is not as easy as it seems. There’s a lot of complexities . . . and I don’t know that everyone would understand that. We’re all from the African continent.” She is certainly “complex.” A few years ago, while promoting her art, Dolezal claimed to have been born to a black father “in a teepee in Montana,” to have grown up “wearing moccasins” and “planting seeds,” and to have “African-American, Native American, German, Czech, Swedish, Jewish and Arabic” heritage. Most people, she concludes, don’t understand the “definitions of race and ethnicity” that she is using. These are lies, and bold ones at that.


Now, lies are not necessarily delusions, and it is possible that Dolezal is just a good old-fashioned fabricator who will soon disappear in disgrace. But, arguendo, we might ask what will happen if she doesn’t? What if, instead, she elects to press any one of these falsehoods — perhaps hinting that she feels excluded from her “real” heritage, and is maybe suicidal too? Should such a case arise, I find it extremely difficult to believe the reflexive reaction would be “Sorry, the science and the history don’t back you up here, please quit your job and check into a hospital.” Rather, if present trends are any indication, we will likely see exactly the opposite. Instead of explaining why the two are incomparable, our favorite socially conscious types would almost certainly begin to ask, “Well, why does it matter to everyone else what Dolezal believes?”; “Did our unjust society push her into this way of thinking, and isn’t it just as valid as others?”; “Is she likely to kill herself if we tell her she is wrong or offensive or ill?”; “Doesn’t society have a responsibility to adapt so that she feels welcome?”; “Race is just a construct anyway, so why does it matter how people classify themselves?”; “It’s polite to take people at face value”; and, eventually, “Which is worse: a doctor changing her color and our indulging her behavior, or her living in fear and distress?” Then, it having been established that skepticism is closed-minded and even dangerous, the social pressure will start, and at a considerable distance from the original debate.


Today, when someone elects to write a piece rejecting the conceit that Laverne Cox or Caitlyn Jenner are actually “women” in any meaningful sense, they are immediately and vehemently accused of “hatred” and of “bigotry” and of “promoting suicide,” and they are deemed unfit for work and for polite society. In the small number of cases in which they are actually engaged, the zetetics are told haughtily that the science is “settled” and they are then informed that in order to save the lives of those who are suffering, they need to adjust their world view, pronto. 

Whatever their pedigree, dissenting scientists are dismissed. Whatever their reputation, inquiring minds are liable to become the victims of roaming mobs of wailers and screamers and hard-ass enforcers who demand the repeating of the catechism as might an inquisitor and who scream like a banshee if they do not get it. Outside its contrived supporting role, sustained argument really doesn’t enter into it. I see no good reason to imagine that it would do so were race to become the fashionable topic, rather than, say, gender, disability, or “otherkin”-ness. The hierarchy of pieties is liable to be changed on a whim, and, when it does, the “science” is liable to follow suit. It will do so again. Just wait.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.
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Fangs, Light Sabers and a Supernumary Papilla


By Mark Steyn
June 13, 2015


Christopher Lee died last weekend at the grand old age of 93, and remarkably his widow managed to keep it out of the public prints until Thursday, in order that she and their family might be able to grieve in peace. He had a long career going back seven decades and comprising many memorable roles: A Transylvanian count and a Jedi count, a Dark Lord of the Sith who became a Knight Bachelor in the 2009 Queen's Birthday Honours. Last year, aged 92, he made a heavy metal record of "My Way", and, in an unflashy and understated way, he did do it his way. The record shows he took the blows - from Professor van Helsing, from 007, from Anakin Skywalker, and from a multitude of hobbits.

Before he was an actor, he was an intelligence officer, and had, as they used to say, a good war, attached to the Special Operations Executive, or the "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare", responsible for espionage and sabotage in occupied Europe. Afterwards, Lee stayed on to hunt down Nazi war criminals. Back in London in 1946, he lunched with a Continental cousin, now the Italian Ambassador to the Court of St James's, and confessed he had no idea what to do next, except that he had no desire to return to his pre-war job as a switchboard operator at the pharmaceutical company Beecham's. "Why don't you become an actor?" suggested the Ambassador. So he did. Two years later he was a spear carrier in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, in which he met another up-and-comer playing Osric, Peter Cushing.

It took Hammer horror films to make both men stars,albeit B-movie stars. Lee was a very suave and seductive Dracula trying to stay one step ahead of Cushing's van Helsing while leaving a trail of blood-drained totty behind. As a teenager, I loved the Hammer movies, although I had a mild preference for the lesbian-vampire ones with Ingrid Pitt, Pippa Steel, Yutte Stensgaard et al. The bottom seems to have dropped out of the whole lesbian-vampire genre. No doubt, in these touchy times, it would be a fraught business reviving it. But Sir Christopher's count holds up pretty well. Aside from bloodshot eyes and stick-on fangs, there weren't a lot of special effects: Today you'd do it all with CGI, but back then there was nothing to make the horror but lighting and acting. You can see, in middle age, all the techniques that would give Lee an enduring cool well into the Nineties: the mellifluous voice; the flicker of an eyebrow - and then suddenly the flash of red in the eyes and the bared fangs, the ravenous feasting on some dolly bird's neck, and all the scarier for emerging from Lee's urbane underplaying.

He was upgraded to Bond nemesis Francisco Scaramanga, The Man With The Golden Gun - and a supernumary papilla, which is to say a third nipple. Lee was a cousin of Ian Fleming, who'd offered him the chance to be the very first Bond villain inDoctor No twelve years earlier. It would have been fun to see Lee and Sean Connery together, but, role-wise, he was right to wait. He'd known Roger Moore almost as long as cousin Ian: They'd first met in 1948. Golden Gun is a mixed bag for Bond fans, what with the somewhat improbable presence in Thailand of redneck sheriff J W Pepper and the other Roger Moorier elements. But Britt Ekland runs around in a bikini, and Lee's Scaramanga is a rare opponent who is (almost) the equal of 007. Landing at Los Angeles to promote the film on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, Sir Christopher had his golden gun seized by US Customs and never returned - a reminder that these guys were pulling this nonsense long before the TSA came along.

His own favorite film was Jinnah, in which he played the title role of Pakistan's ascetic founder. It's very credible, but it's not why audiences loved him. Lee redeemed almost anything he was in, but had his work cut out when George Lucas signed him for the Star Wars prequels. By then Lucas was a director without peer when it comes to getting bad performances out of great actors. Once upon a time Ewan McGregor was one of the sexiest actors on the planet. Then George Lucas cast him as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and turned him into a souvenir action-figure with no private parts and a flat monotone voice. As Princess Amidala, Natalie Portman couldn't be Aniduller. The kid who plays Anakin seems like he should be the shy fellow in the back in some passing boy band but instead his agent stuck him with some lousy movie gig in a language not his own. He and Miss Portman roll in the grass like it's a contractual obligation. The most fully realized characters are the computer-generated ones, like Yoda, the wrinkly midget with the inverted word order that nevertheless sounds less unnatural than the rest of the inert, stilted dialogue.

But, when it comes to such acting honors as there are in the series, the Empire strikes back! Lee as Count Dooku and Ian McDiarmid as Chancellor Palpatine have the measure of Star Wars: go with the hokum, have some fun doing the standard creepy-snooty Brit bad-guy shtick, and cash the check.

The same year as his final Dooku turn - 2005 - I took my kids to see Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, in which halfway through Lee turns up as Willie Wonka's dad. "Hey, look it's Count Dooku," I said to my youngest, who was a big fan of Sir Christopher's splendid turn as a Dark Lord. The lad turned to me very annoyed and said: "Would Count Dooku be a dentist? I don't think so." It put him in a sulky mood for the rest of the day.

The difference between Tim Burton's 2005 remake and the original three decades earlier is telling. Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory just gets on with it, unpretentiously; Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is more artful and detached, as if its principal aim is not to enchant but to be admired. As usual with Burton, it looks great, with beautiful details — to single out just one, the retro delivery bikes with which Wonka's couriers fan out across the town. Burton creates a sorta-English industrial city with Wonka's gargantuan chocolate factory looming over streets of terraced houses, in the midst of which is Charlie's home, a dilapidated Dickensian ruin, its splayed gables and walls pointing in all directions simultaneously. 
But, estranged from Dahl's sense of humor, Tim Burton substitutes his own plot baggage — specifically the notion that Wonka is the way he is because (stop me if you've heard this one before, not least from Star Wars) he has "issues" with his dad unresolved from childhood. Oh, dear.

As he did so often in recent years, Lee gave it his best - to the point where the sincerity of Pa Wonka's scenes with Depp seems weirdly out of place in a film whose heart is icy cold and never shakes the feeling that everyone's only doing it because someone told them it would be an easy way to make a pile of money. By now, Lee, in his mid-eighties, had more work than ever. On the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, he was the only member of the cast who'd actually known Tolkien. Yet my favorite moment in the series isn't even on camera, but in the DVD commentary. It's the scene on top of the tower where Lee's Saruman gets stabbed in the back by Grima Wormtongue, for which the director, Peter Jackson, wanted Lee to let out a scream.

The actor felt obliged to explain to Sir Peter why that would be all wrong. He proposed to let out a small groan, a quiet gasp, as the air is pushed out of his punctured lungs. The director was resistant, so Lee said: "Peter, have you ever heard the sound a man makes when he's stabbed in the back?"

"Um, no," replied Jackson.

"Well, I have," said Lee, "and I know what to do.'" And from somewhere deep in the recesses of his memory an old SOE agent conjured the sound a Nazi makes when you plunge the knife in.

A full life, on-screen and off.

© 2015 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.
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Saturday, June 13, 2015

Christopher Lee: he could turn schlock into Shakespeare


By Robbie Collin
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
11 June 2015

Christoper Lee always brought more to a film than it perhaps deserved of him

The thing about Sir Christopher Lee being dead is that it doesn’t immediately strike you as being much of a career setback. For as long as he was an actor (which was a very long time indeed; his first film role was a one-line part in Terence Young’s baroquely strange romance Corridor of Mirrors, in 1948), his characters have often exuded – not immortality, exactly, but a kind of ennobled deathlessness. You always sensed they’d been around for longer than was perhaps entirely natural, and would more than likely outlast you.
Part of it was his face and imposing 6’5” frame, which had the sharply hewn angles of a medieval woodcut. And part of it was the wood-fire crackle of that bass-baritone voice, which made every script sound like illuminated manuscript. But there was also something less easily explicable at work; he imbued every character, however far-fetched, with a cold and granite grandeur, as if each one was a monument that would withstand whatever time and the weather could throw at him.
Whether he was stalking across windblown Scottish clifftops in The Wicker Man, his hair thick and wild as a tuffet of heather, or swishing, leering and hissing his way though any number of the Dracula pictures he made for Hammer Film Productions, Lee imbued each role with the depth of feeling you expect actors of his reputation and calibre to save for their big Shakespearean comeback at Stratford.
But at the age of 92, there was his Saruman, in Peter Jackson’s final Hobbit film, fighting off the forces of the Nazgul with hitherto-unseen powers of kung fu. The scene was preposterous, but Lee didn’t just emerge from it with his dignity unbroken – his unbreakable dignity was the framework on which the entire sequence was built. He regularly brought more to a film than the film perhaps deserved from him, which is what separates a truly great actor from a talented one.
Lee was the son of a Lieutenant Colonel in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and a much-admired Italian contessa, which makes sense. After fighting in the Second World War (he was born on 27 May 1922, and was 17 years old when war broke out), he returned to England and pursued a career as an actor, and was given a seven-year contract with Rank.
After that, he scrabbled around for supporting work, his height a disadvantage until he was cast as the Creature in the 1957 Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein (Peter Cushing played the Doctor). The character was mute: there was a wicked rumour Lee insisted on this after reading his proposed dialogue. But his performance was a masterwork of purely physical performance: stately, aching with pathos and, against all the odds, intensely moving.
The following year he was cast as the Count in Terence Fisher’s Dracula, with Cushing as Van Helsing, and the future of his career snapped into place. His Dracula was netherworlds apart from Bela Lugosi’s more straightforwardly tragic portrayal of the character in Tod Browning’s 1931 film for Universal. This denizen of the dark was sensual, exotic and wolfish; red-blooded in his appetites in every sense.
He was also mostly silent: the character was almost entirely informed by Lee’s suavely elongated physicality, and speaks only 13 lines of dialogue throughout. “One of the most revolting pictures I have seen for years,” said the critic for the Daily Express. Audiences agreed, and flocked to see it.
Lee hit his sepulchral stride. Over the next decade, he played a Mummy, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Dracula and other vampires, and assorted wicked earls and barons, all for Hammer. Then in 1968, in Terence Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out, he bucked the trend and played the hero: the dashing Duc de Richleau, a dapper initiate in the ways of the occult who disrupts the foul activities of a Satanic cult.
The film was a commercial failure for Hammer, but one of their best films: Lee always regarded it as a personal favourite during his time with the studio, along with Taste of Fear, a truly unnerving Clouzot-ish psychological thriller, with Lee as an unctuous French doctor tending to a young woman who keeps spotting her father’s corpse around the house.
In the early 1970s, with Hammer’s powers fading, Lee’s graveyard shift came to a natural end, and he started branching out. He was deliciously precise as Mycroft Holmes, the great detective’s elder brother, in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and unforgettable as Lord Summerisle, the gallant intercessor between man and nature in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973).
And as Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), he was Roger Moore’s equal and opposite in every respect. “Face it,” wrote the critic David Thompson, “he could just as easily have been Bond.” Well, yes, but perhaps not in the 1970s, as the series swung into its camp heyday. Lee brought a sculpted cruelty to his Bond film that recalled the Sean Connery films of ten years earlier. A Lee hero belonged to another era.
His wickedness, however, was timeless, and could expand to fill almost any available space. As the white wizard Saruman, his presence hung over Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-3) like a volcanic pall. You sense George Lucas cast him as the fallen Jedi Master Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in the hope that he’d provide exactly the same instant gravitas, and Lee couldn’t help but graciously oblige.
Of all Lee’s performances, it’s his entrance in the first Lord of the Rings film that I just can’t shake. “Smoke rises from the mountain of Doom, the hour grows late…” he intones, gliding down Orthanc’s black staircase to receive the friend he’d already in his heart betrayed.
In The Two Towers, Tolkien devotes an entire paragraph to describing Saruman’s voice. It is “low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment…for those whom it conquered, the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice, whispering and urging them.” That’s also unmistakably Lee’s voice, and Lee’s physicality, and Lee’s undying talent. He was the shadow at the top of the stairs, the smiling predator beckoning you in, the flash of silver in the dark.
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The 588-year path to limited government

June 12, 2015
A general view of Magna Carta on display at the Heritage Gallery on June 5 in London (Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images)

Americans should light 800 candles for the birthday of the document that began paving the meandering path to limited government. Magna Carta laid down the law about “fish weirs” on English rivers, “assizes of darrein presentment,” people being “distrained to make bridges,” and other “liberties. . . to hold in our realm of England in perpetuity.” But what King John accepted at Runnymede meadow on June 15, 1215, matters to Americans because of something that happened 588 years later in the living room of Stelle’s Hotel in Washington, where the Library of Congress now sits.
Although the “great charter” purported to establish certain rights in “perpetuity,” almost everything in it has been repealed or otherwise superseded. Magna Carta led to parliamentary supremacy (over the sovereign — the king or queen) but not to effective limits on government. The importance of the document was its assertion that the sovereign’s will could be constrained.
In America, where “we the people” are sovereign and majority rule is celebrated, constraining the sovereign is frequently, but incorrectly, considered morally ambiguous, even disreputable. Hence the heated debate among conservatives about the role of courts in a democracy. The argument is about the supposed “countermajoritarian dilemma” when courts invalidate laws passed by elected representatives: Does the democratic ethic require vast judicial deference to legislative acts?
The first memorial at Runnymede was built in 1957 by, appropriately, the American Bar Association. It is what America did with what Magna Carta started that substantially advanced the cause of limited government.
The rule of law — as opposed to rule by the untrammeled will of the strong — requires effective checks on the strong. In a democracy, the strongest force is the majority, whose power will be unlimited unless an independent judiciary enforces written restraints, such as those stipulated in the Constitution. It is “the supreme law” because it is superior to what majorities produce in statutes.
Magna Carta acknowledged no new individual rights. Instead, it insisted, mistakenly, that it could guarantee that certain existing rights would survive “in perpetuity.” British rights exist, however, at the sufferance of Parliament. In America, rights are protected by the government’s constitutional architecture — the separation of powers and by the judicial power to stymie legislative and executive power .
Early in 1801, as John Adams’s presidency was ending, a lame-duck Congress controlled by his Federalists created many judicial positions to be filled by him before Thomas Jefferson took office. In the rush, the “midnight commission” for William Marbury did not get delivered before Jefferson’s inauguration. The new president refused to have it delivered, so Marbury sued, asking the Supreme Court to compel Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison, to deliver it.
Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the court, held that the law authorizing the court to compel government officials to make such deliveries exceeded Congress’s enumerated powers and hence was unconstitutional. Jefferson, who detested his distant cousin Marshall, was surely less pleased by the result than he was dismayed by the much more important means by which Marshall produced it. Marshall had accomplished the new government’s first exercise of judicial review — the power to declare a congressional act null and void.
Although the Constitution does not mention judicial review, the Framers explicitly anticipated the exercise of this power. Some progressives and populist conservatives dispute the legitimacy of judicial review. They say fidelity to the Framers requires vast deference to elected legislators because Marshall invented judicial review ex nihilo. Randy Barnett of Georgetown University’s law school supplies refuting evidence:
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Madison acknowledged that states would “accomplish their injurious objects” but they could be “set aside by the National Tribunals.” A law violating any constitution “would be considered by the Judges as null & void.” In Virginia’s ratification convention, Marshall said that if the government “were to make a law not warranted by any of the [congressional] powers enumerated, it would be considered by the judges as an infringement of the Constitution which they are to guard. . . . They would declare it void.”
With the composition of the Supreme Court likely to change substantially during the next president’s tenure, conservatives must decide: Is majority rule or liberty — these are not synonyms, and the former can menace the latter — America’s fundamental purpose?
Because one ailing justice was confined to Stelle’s Hotel, it was there that Marshall read aloud Marbury v. Madison. This made Feb. 24, 1803, an even more important date in the history of limited government, and hence of liberty, than June 15, 1215.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.
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Thursday, June 11, 2015

IMMIGRATION -- HEY, LOOK! A COP YELLING AT A BLACK GIRL IN A BIKINI!


By Ann Coulter
June 10, 2015



I'm impressed by the coolness and steadiness of our media in suppressing any news about immigration. It's as if they've built a triple-layer fence with border guards around immigration topics. And guess what? Their fence is working!


How many thousands of news stories have there been on Ferguson, ISIS, Chris Christie's "Bridgegate" or men becoming women?


But the media will never tell you about Mexicans gang-raping a lesbian in Richmond, California, an Indian immigrant in San Francisco importing 12-year-old girls he bought from their parents for sex, or three children being beheaded by Mexicans in Baltimore.


Don't Americans have a right to know about the cultures flooding into our country?


This isn't a natural transformation. It is purely the result of government policy. But our media don't care to discuss the issue. In fact, they get mad whenever Americans find out what they're doing with immigration.


When Americans do think about immigration, they're against it. In polls earlier this year, more Americans had a favorable opinion of North Korea than wanted to increase immigration. That's why the media's approach to immigration is to never talk about it.


Three times in the last decade, Democrats and Republicans conspired to grant illegal aliens amnesty. All three times, the American people rose up in blind rage and shut it down. The only way they were tipped off to the proposed amnesties was through the hard work of about three bloggers, four talk-radio hosts and the Drudge Report.


What will happen if Matt Drudge ever goes on vacation? (Answer: You'll be living in Mexico.)


The media will make absolutely sure we know about every immigrant who wins a spelling bee. It's either important to know about who's immigrating to this country or it's not. If it's important, then we have a right to be told not only about the spelling bee champions, but also about the child rapes, genital mutilations, welfare use and Medicaid scams of our recent immigrants.



But the media's position is: If we don't talk about immigration, it doesn't exist.


Unfortunately, they're right. Most people think about only what the media want them to think about. Everyone has developed a position on Ferguson, ISIS and gay marriage. This week, everyone has a position on a policeman's confrontation with a black girl in a bikini at a pool party in Texas.


But no one is supposed to have an opinion about who gets to live, collect government benefits and vote in this country.


Whatever issue you think is more important than immigration, you're wrong. Without our post-1965 immigration policy, Obama would never have been elected president. That means no Obamacare, no withdrawal of every last troop from Iraq, no playing footsie with the Iranians, no Eric Holder, no Fast and Furious, no IRS harassment of tea party groups, no Benghazi massacre -- and on and on and on.


Democrats haven't been able to persuade a majority of white people to vote for them in any presidential election since 1948, except the aberrational Democratic landslide in 1964. That's why they had to bring in ringers.


In addition to giving the Democrats tens of millions of new voters, our immigration policies have also brought in people who engage in charming traditional practices such as genital mutilations.


In 2006, an Ethiopian immigrant living in Lawrenceville, Georgia, tried to cut off his 2-year-old daughter's clitoris with a pair of scissors. The New York Times ran one tiny AP item on his conviction -- on Page 19 -- titled, "Man Convicted in Daughter's Mutilation." (Always look for "Man" in the headline to find the most appalling stories about immigrants.)


Thanks to decades of mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East, it is estimated that at least half a million girls living in the United States have been subjected to genital mutilation. (And that's just one of the many ways immigrants are making our country more vibrant!)


One white male, Bruce Jenner, merely contemplates voluntary genital mutilation and gets 10,000 times more media attention than the hundreds of thousands of "American" girls being involuntarily subjected to this practice.


When it comes to immigration, you'll only hear "Diversity is a strength," "Immigration is fantastic for the economy," "Polls show Americans overwhelmingly support a 'path to legalization'" -- pay no attention to the outpouring of hostility every time an amnesty bill comes up -- and "Oh, look! An immigrant valedictorian!"


The media don't need to run this scam forever. Democrats only need to keep it going until they have California-style majorities in every state, and then they'll say, "Screw you, America. We did this deliberately, and now there's nothing you can do about it."


That's exactly what the Labour government of Tony Blair did -- as we found out in 2009. In public, Blair's government claimed that the mass immigration of the Third World to Britain was absolutely crucial to the economy!


Once they were out of office, Blair adviser Andrew Neather admitted that their real objective had been "to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date," as the London Telegraph reported in 2009.


That's one way of winning elections. It's cheating, but it works!


Here in the U.S., Republicans aren't even fighting back. First of all, the GOP's big donors want the cheap labor. True, the country will be ruined, but business owners will be able to make a pile first -- and then retire.


Evidently, elected Republicans ran the numbers and realized that the GOP won't be completely wiped out for a few more years, and by then, they'll all be retired.


Apres moi, le deluge.


(Noticeably, the younger, smarter Republicans are all on America's side on immigration: Sens. Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, and Rep. Dave Brat.)


If necessary, political and media elites will call you a "racist" for opposing their mass immigration policies. But they'd really rather that you just not find out what they're doing to the country.


COPYRIGHT 2015 ANN COULTER 
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