SHUT DOWN! (or) Who totaled Detroit?

  

 “…in the real world they’re shuttin’ Detroit down.” –popular Country tune

Once upon a time in America there was a mighty metropolis boasting the most original and stunning architecture in the country. It made significant contributions to the performing arts from orchestral concerts to pop music, it set trends for innovation in radio and the burgeoning business of television, in construction and education; and in every aspect of that far-flung and thriving market economy engendered by the wealth of the industrial revolution and rekindled in the boom days following World War II, Detroit excelled….and at the very heart of this, a mighty pulse driven by the creative and productive life-force of the automotive industry beat resoundingly. At its peak Detroit boasted a population of nearly two million, and this population included communities of well-housed, well educated, and gainfully employed blacks most of whom emanated from nuclear families within a healthy and expanding urban middle class.  Three metropolitan dailies, the Detroit Times, News and Free Press chronicled events and yes, even the Detroit Lions even played football well—do you doubt us? Quarterbacks Bobby “Night Train” Layne and Tobin Rote led the Lions to legendary victories and championship games, clobbering the Browns in ’52, and the 49ers and the Browns in ’57.  Layne alone captained the Lions to three NFL championship games ensuring the motor city  more than a decade of Hall of Fame football, but following injuries to his leg received in a pile-on, Layne was hastily traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers, and thus ensued the legend of his curse.

Louis Kamper’s book tower is an example of Detroit’s extraordinary architecture.

According to the legend, upon departing for Pittsburgh, Layne cried out that in retribution for its ingratitude, Detroit would not win another championship for 50 years. And they haven’t. Heck, it’s been 55 years, and the curse remains intact! It might be tempting to infer that Layne’s curse, like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow in Chicago, created massive, if unintentional, collateral damage—but this is unfair to Layne. In fact, an amalgam of forces conspired to devastate Detroit, sharing no common thread except liberalism in ever-increasing doses, for as students of the phenomenon are well aware, the most pernicious singularity of liberalism is its proneness to create emergencies that to the untutored observer seem resolvable only by the application of more liberalism, until finally nothing remains and the media change the subject, or assign blame elsewhere. The first liberal scourge to afflict Detroit was Unions—or perhaps we should say the co-opting and subornment of Union leadership by communists. Communists in Detroit autoworker unions? Nonsense, you say—the American autoworker would never have abided any such thing, particularly in the era under discussion. But as is almost invariably the case, the solid citizens who paid their union dues never knew anything about it.

Both Soupy Sales and the Lone Ranger originated in Detroit!

Who was Walter Reuther?

If you grew up in or around Detroit in the ‘40s or ‘50s you were taught by newsreels and social-studies lecturers that Walter Reuther, the head of the UAW, was as staunchly American as apple pie and stood courageously against the forces of communism in the automotive manufacturing arena. Flapdoodle and balderdash, Woofketeers! Comrade Reuther was the devoted son of a German socialist. Young Walter quit his job with the Ford motor company to emigrate to the Soviet Union where he helped establish Soviet auto plants between 1933 and ’35, while steeping himself in Marxist doctrine. Returning to America he joined the UAW, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party USA. Following World War II, Reuther affected an anti-Communist position while working within the Democratic party to further the destruction of capitalism. He founded the subversive Americans for Democratic Action and led the United Auto Workers in sundry negotiations with Detroit’s “big three” auto manufacturers, cooperating closely with FDR, Truman, and Lyndon Johnson in the establishment of socialist/syndicalist dominance of manufacturing in America. Barry Goldwater took to the Senate floor in 1958 to call Reuther and the UAW a “more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America,” but as usual, America’s horn-rimmed Cassandra went unheeded and Unions continued to tighten their strangle hold on the manufacturers in Detroit and elsewhere. Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970, but was posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton in 1995. He left the UAW permanently radicalized and remains the toast of radical Marxist websites…as well as the Clintons, evidently.

Walter Reuther (in front) and socialist/realist comrades marching toward soviet America

The Riot that missed

Nineteen-hundred and sixty seven was a particularly bad year for Detroiters. The oleaginous Lyndon Baines Johnson having only 3 years earlier bested (inexplicably) the afore-mentioned Barry Goldwater in the contest to become the nation’s first elected post-JFK president, took time away from his criminally inept Viet Nam policies to launch a flurry of equally ruinous and equally expensive social programs bundled under the rubric of “The Great Society.” And on July 23 of that “long, hot summer,” the Detroit riot broke out. It began on a Saturday night in the early-morning hours when Detroit police raided an unlicensed, after-hours bar and place of illegal gambling at 12th and Clairmount. Confrontations during the raid rapidly spread to the street outside and burst into the deadliest and most destructive riot in the Nation’s history. It was 5 bloody days before police, National Guard troops and the regular Army restored order. But if the violence was meant as a rebuke to white dominance of the national culture,  it missed its mark.  Hundreds of black businesses, buildings, and homes were reduced to rubble, and in the aftermath prosperous urban blacks and whites began to flock to the city’s suburbs, draining Detroit of a creative passion and industriousness—as well as an infrastructure and a tax base.

National Guard patrolling Linwood and Chicago on Detroit’s West Side–their stuff was made in Detroit too!

President Johnson’s response to the riot was to declare Detroit a “model city” for social engineering. His brain stormers devised hundreds of new welfare and anti-poverty projects meant to eliminate the perceived causes of urban violence—but just as aid to starving countries overseas is typically resold to the highest bidder by the despots du jure, the massive subsidization of Detroit’s poor resulted in sweetheart patronage deals and massive misappropriations of funding, while creating a financial impetus for the target population to remain or become all the things the projects sought to eliminate (because when you subsidize something you get more of it ). Thus, in the wake of “white flight” to the suburbs, which was in reality black and white flight, the neediest and most dysfunctional elements of the inner city population remained behind and found themselves mendicants subservient to Johnson’s welfare state, (did we mention he beat Goldwater?) which paid them to be single or unwed mothers, paid them to have more children out of wedlock, paid them to be hungry, paid them to be unemployed, and threatened to cut their benefits should they evince the slightest signs of upward mobility. Detroit’s financial situation plummeted and its homicide rate promptly quintupled. The family structure was demolished by Johnson, and Richard Nixon, who followed, announced that “we are all Keynesians now,” His administration, thus premised, did little to alter the city’s descent into poverty and dependency.

Johnson beat Goldwater by only 44 states–Barry should have demanded a recount!

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Came next the rapid spread of automotive creativity around the world. The Germans had always owned a minute percentage of the American auto market, but in the ‘70s the Japanese staged an automotive coups, rapidly gaining ground against Detroit, whose product was in most respects inferior to the unexpected flood of Hondas, Isuzus, Subarus and Mitsubishis, on top of which, American labor cost so much it was impossible to beat the low Japanese sticker prices. The unions wouldn’t budge, of course, so the “Big Three” took a nosedive—the first of many to follow—and Detroit lost more revenue and prestige.

Uh-ohhh!

The industry was in the process of taking its latest nosedive, seemingly into oblivion, when President Obama happened on the scene. Speaking of which, what’s bigger than a bread box, bigger than the State Department’s budget, bigger than all the foreign aid we extend other countries over the course of a year, and bigger than the funding for NASA?  Answer: The twenty-seven billion dollars President Obama handed the United Auto Workers union when he took over Chrysler and General Motors even as he fumed at Ford Motors for refusing to knuckle under to his economic goon squads. See, Our Beloved Leader didn’t actually bail out Detroit or even the auto industry so much as he handed a titanic wad of cash to the UAW and placed it in charge of what Karl Marx liked to call “the means of production.” And the disconcerting fact remains that the UAW didn’t need to be bailed out, its members were already making 70 dollars an hour. As Obama’s “car czar” Stephen Rattner admitted, “We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” No, the UAW got the business–it was the bond holders, those filthy capitalist pigs, who took a bath as Obama haughtily cheated them out of their investments and went out of his way to demolish non-union auto industries such as the Delphi plant in Ohio which was a primary parts supplier for General Motors. Here Obama blithely ignored 20,000 workers who lost benefits, pensions, and health care—the price of non-affiliation with the socialist totalitarian conspiracy. Moreover, WOOF knows that Tim Geitner, then at Treasury, spearheaded a direct and personal attack on Delphi workers at the behest of Our Dear Leader.

The Volt continues to hit snags on the highway to green-energy utopia.

But what of the motor city? What of Detroit? Detroit didn’t get much money, Woofketeers, because they weren’t tactically necessary to Obama’s advancement. Even the vast wealth that went to bolster GM and Chrysler boiled down to empowering and underwriting the UAW. Pursuit of Our Beloved Helmsman’s green energy fixation resulted in GM dropping all its significant research into fusion, canning anyone who knew how to make cars, killing off its most attractive lines of conventional autos and making lots of Volts instead. The Volt was going to get 200 miles to the gallon and revolutionize the car business—while keeping the planet green, of course. This is where the administration’s Wilsonian utopianism took over from its more cynical Marxist side and sank tons of your cash and our cash into producing a wonder car that ultimately got 35 miles per charge of electricity, could not be conveniently recharged without risking house fires, and occasionally shocked drivers in the process of shifting gears. To produce one Chevy Volt costs GM 41,000 dollars. The car can be purchased by you for 42, 000 dollars. But Americans don’t want to drive Volts. They want to drive Corvettes and Suburbans.  So sales for the Volt have been awful—and remain awful even now that Obama is willing to borrow ten-thousand dollars from Red China to pay you to purchase a Volt (they call it a rebate).

Home charging the Volt can be an expensive proposition….

So, sad story sadder, Detroit got no real boost from Dear Leader’s pipe dream of solar powered SUVs and managerially brilliant Union leaders taking over for the likes of Lee Iacocca or Alfred Pritchard Sloan. No, all it got was a commercial with Eminem trying to sound macho. In the auto industry, Ford, the American carmaker that refused to take Obama’s filthy lucre, has consistently outperformed the other two constituents of the “big three.” Chrysler has managed to regain some footing, posting an 8 percent improvement in June sales over last year. General Motors is claiming a 6 percent increase in the same time frame. But even if the auto industry can shake off Obama-ism and regain some of its former stature, it will be too late for the Motor City.

On October 13, 2012, while pursuing re-election, President Obama smiled his vacuous smile into the lens of an innocent TV camera and explained to the American people that he had saved Detroit. “We refused to throw in the towel and do nothing,” he said. “We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt, I bet on American workers and American ingenuity and three years later that bet is paying off in a big way.” Well, here it is 9 months later, and Detroit has gone bankrupt—can somebody find Eminem and ask him what’s up with this?  He pointed his finger right at us during that Super Bowl commercial and looked as threatening as a white kid who calls himself “Eminem” can mange to look, and gave us the impression that Detroit was saved by auto production, black choirs singing at the Fox Theater on Woodward Avenue (which thus far has escaped destruction, by the grace of God), and a bunch of scary socialist/realist art (forgive the tautology) which he showed us while singing (well, chanting) the city’s praises. No wonder they call him shady!  If Detroit is now a case of economic destitution, and believe us it is, why not ask for some more bailout money?

Well, more is definitely coming—Obama will “rescue” Detroit (again) in time for the 2014 elections, and it won’t make a dent in the city’s problems, but it will sound like the resurrection of Lazarus on the TV news, and nobody will address the main problem, which is that a city of dependents elects criminals and ne’er-do-wells who will maintain them on the doles, rather than innovators who will create jobs and opportunity. Former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young once said, “To attack Detroit is to attack black!” And a city that will not hear its critics will not be long deterred from the precipice. Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick left for jail in 2008 in the throes of a sex and perjury scandal. Dave Bing is now mayor—his principle qualification being that he played basketball for the Detroit Pistons.

Detroit Councilman Kwame Kenyatta–just one of nine.

And what of the City Council members—are they in frenzied conclave to avert economic and sociopolitical destruction?  Detroit’s City Council is busy—too busy, in fact, for such divertissements. It just spent three days debating the wisdom of a resolution supporting a federal investigation into the culpability of  George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin. Readers will be reassured to learn that the Detroit City Council, after much focused discussion, voted unanimously to enjoin William Holder to press Federal charges against Zimmerman in the wake of his being found not guilty in Florida.  Detroit has meanwhile hosted 176 homicides thus far in 2013—and 70% of these are unsolved; but to attack Detroit, our gentle readers will recall, is to attack black. Fortunately, the establishment’s media remain alert to the true source of Detroit’s decline, and courageous enough to speak truth to power! MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry saw the problem in a heartbeat.  She explained that bankruptcy was the natural result of too little government. “This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub and it is not a pretty picture,” she said. adding that Republicans want to turn all our cities into Detroit.  Always keen to ensure intellectual ballast, MSNBC provided next the acuities of Howard Dean, who assured Harris-Perry and her other guests that Detroit was going to be all right after all, because “When you have a median home price of $45,000, people are going to go buy those houses sooner or later.”  Right? 

…WITH ZIMMERMAN, MARTIN, AND RAHM (WOOF finally caves in and discusses the Trayvon Martin affair.)

Trayvon deflated, Zimmerman inflated, media frustrated…  

WOOF would like to begin by acknowledging that we weren’t there the night Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, and, of course, neither were any of the several million opinionists who have pronounced authoritatively on the event—except for the witnesses introduced at trial, so we don’t know what was in Zimmerman’s heart of head, or in Martin’s, but we do know this much: No jury could possibly have convicted on the evidence, or rather on the surprising paucity of evidence, offered in the courtroom. The eternally bollixed crew at the Nation may have declared that Zimmerman was freed by “white supremacy,” but it was really just six jurors and an unbreachable defense. The preternatural ineptitude of the prosecution, whose own witnesses either self-destructed or sounded like a cheering section for the accused, startled the media and left the jurors no valid option but acquittal. So yes, Zimmerman should have walked, and yes he should get his gun back. But what is most interesting to WOOF is the deranged sociology that surrounded and continues to surround the events of the shooting. First, WOOF notes the amazing transformation of the main characters, and on several levels of interpretation. Allow us to explain:

We begin with Zimmerman, the run-of-the-mill Hispanic dude, widely considered a reliable sort who apparently lived in a mobile home in the central Florida city of Sanford where he was employed as a mortgage officer, and who often volunteered as a neighborhood watch captain in the gated Twin Lakes community. Not exactly a guy you’d cast to play Reinhard Heydrich, right? And yet a man who, as The Nation made clear in its own lovably asinine way, became the Leftwing Media Establishment’s poster boy for “white supremacy.” Why, the New York Times even created its own race to make Zimmerman appear less ethnic, dubbing him (casually, so that no one would notice) a “white Hispanic.” Obviously, were logic applicable at the Times, the president would necessarily be described as a white black man, but don’t hold your breath.

Two peas in a pod? It strikes WOOF as unlikely.

As Zimmerman rose through the ranks to become the uncontested worst person on earth in the febrile wasteland of the liberal blogosphere, (eat your heart out, Dick Cheney) he simultaneously found himself ballyhooed as blameless and saintly on the websites of the Right. But George Zimmerman is neither Satan nor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—he’s just a guy who was on edge over a cluster of robberies and break ins and therefore decided to follow a suspicious-looking kid on the fateful night of February 26, 2012. His involuntary transformation, whether into the spitting image of Bull Connor (who was a Democrat by the way) or Captain America (who is undoubtedly a Republican) makes no more sense than bringing him to trial did…. But the media created the one image, and the Right responded by creating the other. Lost in all the hubbub is an ordinary man who will never, ever, get his life entirely back.

The purple drank factor

Trayvon as we first  beheld him, younger and a tad sweeter than subsequent depictions

And what of Trayvon? In the immediate wake of his death he was hastily inflated also, his pleasant, youthful features lent themselves to angelic allusions, and he became instantly iconic as the innocent kid with the bag of skittles whose only crime was his race and whose death was dealt him by a bloodthirsty bigot who targeted him for summary execution. President Obama lost not a moment jumping in, declaring “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon!” and dispatched his DOJ to stir up anti-Zimmerman hysteria in Broward County. But Trayvon’s elevation to sainthood began to stall as additional facts developed. He was first declared an all A’s and B’s student, but it soon transpired he’d been suspended from school at the time of his death, his third disciplinary suspension of the year. He was eulogized as a carefree kid who lived a law-abiding life, but police reports suggested otherwise, including a search of his person that on one occasion turned up several pieces of women’s jewelry and a screw driver (a standard burglar’s tool). His suspensions were said to be for minor matters of tardiness and truancy, but the third one turned out to be a marijuana violation.  The autopsy report confirmed the presence of low levels of marijuana in Martin’s system. More significantly perhaps, Martin’s liver was damaged in a manner consistent with the abuse of dextromethorphan (DXM) cough syrup. This syrup is popular in the hip-hop community when mixed with candies (like Skittles) and fruit drinks (like the Arizona Watermelon drink Trayvon was carrying). These ingredients combine to produce a concoction known to gang bangers as “Purple Drank” or “Lean,” the long term effects of which can include aggression and psychosis.. Sadly, the angelic image of Trayvon Martin began to deflate, not because the press was out to get him, (don’t make us laugh), but because their effort to deify him resulted in several thousand researchers in the New Media responding with the unattractive facts, none of which would have come to light if the original police decision to free Zimmerman without charging him had not been intercepted and nullified by Obama, Holder, and their toy news media.

The emergent image of Trayvon–with attitude!

This is neither to say that Trayvon was a psychopathically deranged, irretrievable dope fiend, nor a budding candidate for the priesthood. He was really just unlucky. For all we know he might have straightened out, entered college and become a community organizer—or maybe even something useful, if he hadn’t discarded his life that night by jumping on Zimmerman. For all we know, he just lost his temper and made a fatal miscalculation—but the dignity and normalcy he might have been accorded in death are gone forever now, along with his future. The protesters may have to peel the Skittles bags off their posters as the nasty facts emerge, but they have every right to mourn. The slaying of Trayvon Martin is a tragedy on several levels, for both principles and their families. That it became a political circus is ascribable entirely to the Establishment, which term is nowadays synonymous with the American Left, unless one reasons that it all started when the Right struck back by unearthing the facts.

The media slowly gets the idea–Skittles are also less angelic than first believed.

Angela unchained! (Marissa bound)

But if the protesters were in any mood to drop their Skittles bags and help a sister out, they were conveniently situated because even as George Zimmerman’s acquittal was being announced in Broward County, a black woman was being subjected to positively Kafkaesque levels of injustice in nearby Jacksonville. Yes, fellow Wooferians, thirty-one year old Marissa Alexander, a mother of three small children, was chased from her home by her abusive ex-husband (against whom she had a restraining order) who was loudly and angrily threatening to kill her and who, she testified, tried to strangle her. In terror of her life she fled to the garage with the intention of escaping by automobile, but discovered she had forgotten her keys. She had her gun though, so as her bellicose former spouse drew nearer she decided to discourage his advance by discharging her weapon at a wall. The echoing gunshot sent hubbie scampering, but nobody was hurt. “I believe when he threatened to kill me, that’s what he was absolutely going to do,” Alexander told the authorities. “That’s what he intended to do. Had I not discharged my weapon at that point, I would not be here.”

Angela Corey has a mad on!

But if Mrs. Alexander saved herself from death by strangulation, it soon became apparent that she had  simultaneously placed herself at the mercy of the dangerously addlepated State’s Attorney Angela Corey, who, you may be interested to learn, is the very same addlepated State’s Attorney who brought charges against George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. That Alexander should never have been charged in the first place seems screamingly obvious, especially considering the fact that she never ran afoul of the law prior to exciting Corey’s wrath by warning her husband instead of blowing him away. So, the police arrested her and the execrable Corey decided that the idea of honest citizens defending themselves with guns was sufficiently unthinkable to merit prosecution.  Despite the fact that she wasn’t there and Alexander obviously was, State’s Attorney Corey, who is evidently also a gifted psychic, told the press that she believed Alexander aimed the gun at the man and his two sons, and insisted, “the bullet she fired could have ricocheted and hit any of them.” Of course if we accept the first premise Corey’s analysis puts forth, we would next have to assume logically that Corey believes the bullet might have ricocheted off the children and hit their father, or off the father and hit the children—the only other explanation for the ricochet argument necessitating the belief that Corey wasn’t aiming at anybody at all.

Marissa in jail togs–so much for no criminal record!

WOOF is also unaware of what juries in Jacksonville (the venue of the trial) like to smoke during their deliberations, but how a group of Alexander’s peers returned a verdict of attempted murder in such an open and shut case of self defense remains mysterious. Rather sensibly, Alexander asserted her rights under Florida’s `Stand Your Ground Law,’ but the judge threw this out, telling Alexander that she could and should have run for it. His Honor did not go into what she could have done in the event that her husband caught up with her and resumed strangling her, but presumably he had a plan.  Fortunately, State’s Attorney Corey is not without mercy, and she generously offered Alexander a plea bargain and a three year sentence to go with it. Understandably, Alexander said no thanks, little suspecting that the police, the prosecutor, the judge and the jury would all prove simultaneously, and to approximately equivalent degrees, psychotic.

In happier days.

Alexander was given 20 years under a state law mandating 20 years for any reprobate who discharges a firearm in the course of committing a felony. Victor Crist, the Republican state legislator who authored the “10-20-life” bill in 1999 said Alexander’s sentence is not what lawmakers intended, but nobody seemed to care. “We were trying to get at the thug who was robbing a liquor store,” Crist explained, but his legislation is so poorly written (ignoring, as it does, the imperative concept of premeditation) that it could as easily apply to firing a warning shot at a wall. So why isn’t the Leftist Establishment Media screaming with outrage about white on black injustice in this case? Simple: Alexander defended herself with a handgun—oops—big mistake.

Shoot your wall, do 20 in the big house!

Thus we have this surreal juxtaposition of Zimmerman, acquitted for killing a kid (despite the judge having spared no effort to provide his jurors with a smorgasbord of opportunities to send him up the river while NBC dedicatedly doctored 911 tapes to makes him sound racist), and Marissa Alexander getting dragged off to prison for 20 mandatory years because she shot her wall. It is equally bizarre that such a miscarriage of justice should put WOOF on the side of the NAACP, with whom we haven’t agreed about much since around 1966, and Corrine Brown, U.S. Representative for Florida’s 5th congressional district, with whom we have never previously agreed about anything! But you go, sister! (Our hypocrisy knows no bounds!)

Meanwhile, back at the inner city holocaust….

You go, Corrine! (WOOF isn’t proud.)

Meanwhile, in the cities where murder is perfectly all right so long as it does not seem politically incorrect, people are gunned down all day and all night long by killers whose guns are not registered, whose intent is insensately homicidal, and whose killings go unnoticed by the socialist totalitarian establishment and their lap-poodle media because they fail to promote progressive objectives. In Obama’s and Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, just for instance, where an armed citizenry is celebrated only to the extent that gang bangers may be considered armed citizens, this month has already witnessed 25 shot and killed and 106 wounded. June ended with a total of 40 shot dead and 225 wounded. Over the course of the year to date, the WindyCity has hosted 190 killed and 971 wounded by gunfire. Just since Trayvon Martin was shot, 18 black seventeen-year-old males have been shot and killed in Chicago. (It should be noted that this is actually less murder than at the same time last year in Chicago, but this is because Global Warming apparently caused an especially frigid winter and an unseasonably cold spring. Criminologists agree that murder rates drop with the mercury, although this fact did not prevent Rahm Emanuel from crediting himself with the decrease, he evidently subscribing to the axiom that one should never let a stark repudiation of one’s meteorological lunacy go to waste.

LBJ destroying the black family and building those high rises–but he meant well!

Although blacks constitute not quite 13 percent of the country’s population, they are fully half the people who get murdered every year—and not because they were assailed by skin heads or the KKK. The vast majority of these murders are black on black, but nobody mourns or even particularly notes these victims beyond their families. Writing in USA Today, columnist DeWayne Wickham sapiently mused: “Maybe the people who’ve taken to the streets to protest Martin’s killing don’t care as much about the loss of other black lives because those killings don’t register on the racial conflict meter…” and WOOF couldn’t agree more. But popular opinion in this country is not forged by concerned African Americans, it is forged by manipulative white propagandists (otherwise known as the media and the Democratic party), and to the white liberal establishment the inner city carnage doesn’t matter because it cannot be exploited to political advantage. Worse than that, it points directly to the destruction of the black nuclear family by white socialists (beginning with the disastrous Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson), to the deliberate incapacitation of the public schools by the predominantly white communists of the NEA, and might, if publicized, highlight the positive correlation between strict anti-gun laws and increased shooting deaths.

Despite brilliantly subtle psychological campaigns like this one, black-on-black crime continues to skyrocket!

And now for a round of double jeopardy…

Comes now William Holder, fresh from dispatching his own DOJ agents to organize protests and rallies aimed at eulogizing Trayvon Martin and smearing George Zimmerman well before any testable evidence had been amassed. The legal watchdog group Judicial Watch caught Holder’s minions (Red handed, as it were) and adduced the facts for all to see on its website, viewable here, but of course the media took no notice and Holder, who would have been driven from office in ignominy a dozen times by now were he a white Republican, remains smugly in his seat on Dear Leader’s cabinet. And thus it was with characteristic disregard for legality, legitimacy, and human rights that Holder announced earlier this week that he would be looking for evidence of racial profiling in the Zimmerman shooting, and preferring federal charges if he smelled a rat.  Will Holder make, literally, a federal case of the Zimmerman acquittal?

Uh-ohhh! A Hispanic guy shot a Black guy and William Holder smells a civil rights violation!

Renowned defense lawyer, Harvard law professor and gold-plated ultra-liberal Alan M. Dershowitz is lately in the habit of offering opinions that threaten to make WOOF a part of his fan base, even as he risks that most savage of pan-media beat downs—that mass attack reserved by the Left for its wayward adherents.  In an exclusive interview, Newsmax asked Dershowitz if he saw any grounds for a federal investigation focusing on civil rights violations in the Zimmerman case. He replied in the affirmative, but hastened to add that any federal investigation should focus on “prosecutorial misconduct” rather than Zimmerman, He applauded the not-guilty verdict saying, “I think there were violations of civil rights and civil liberties — by the prosecutor…The prosecutor sent this case to a judge, and willfully, deliberately, and in my view criminally withheld exculpatory evidence.”  Wow, Alan, you’re the mensch!

Alan Dershowitz evinces elation at the news that WOOF is less unfond of him these days.

Okay, we know, Tom wasn’t actually there, but you get the idea, right? And that puts you way ahead of Our Beloved Leader!

The boys back at Independence Hall in 1787 (remember those guys?) signed off on a document that reserved matters of law enforcement to the several states. Victims of public education may be surprised to discover that the country got along fine with no Department of Justice for over a century. The DOJ as we conceptualize it today did not officially exist as a government entity until its creation in 1933 by—you guessed it—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or, “that man,” as Little Orphan Annie disdainfully referred to him. But don’t get us started.

When Holder tasked his department’s “Community Relations Division” to rabble rouse against Zimmerman and threatened Florida with various federal unpleasantries if they did not press charges, he was already at tendentious odds with the Bill of Rights. The pundits who expect him to stay his hand owing to the absence of any plausible grounds for federal intervention are typical of those myriad opinionists who honestly think they are living in the America of yesterday—an America where the rule of law was ensured by conscientious conservators of constitutional writ, and an aggressively inquisitive media stood ready to sound the alarm if shenanigans were attempted from any quarter. But that America is gone, or at least on furlough while President Obama’s rascally pack of race baiters, communists, autocrats and anarcho-fascists runs roughshod over the Constitution, a document that the president denounced not terribly long ago as “a charter of negative liberties,” even as he bluntly declared his intention to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

This is President Obama not getting involved.

The surest evidence that Holder will now move against Zimmerman despite a blatant lack of grounds for doing so is the fact that Barack Obama has elevated himself above such tawdry matters, averring that he will play no part in Holder’s decision. This is funny. Has Obama played a part in any decision during the last five years? According to him and his faithful servants in the news media, he has remained aloof from every disaster, controversy, scandal, and embarrassment that has befallen his administration. Ha! Trust us, Woofketeers, when Our Beloved Leader assures us he will play no part in whether or not his DOJ proceeds against Zimmerman, we may safely infer that he has already ordered Holder to bring him Zimmerman’s scalp on a platter.

So get ready for “Zimmerman 2,” a Barack Hussein Obama production featuring Eric Holder as himself, directed by Al Sharpton, with a script by Bill Ayers from an original idea by Saul Alinsky. (And a cast of millions, of course!) It’s all so predictable it would be amusing, if it weren’t for the sorry spectacle of one short, pudgy Hispanic guy, dragged to the square by the mob, pummeled by a jackbooted government determined to curry favor with the rabble while the media elites call for a necktie party and the rest of us sit on our hands and hope we’re not next. C’mon; show a little backbone America!  WOOF dreams of a day when we can fight bigotry and abject stupidity both at the same time…is this too wild a dream? 

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“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble,… “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”–Charles Dickens “Oliver Twist”

The Unmaking of a President: WOOF bids adieu to Mohammed Morsi!

The strange and not a little tragic telemetry of Muḥammad Muḥammad Mursī ‘Īsá al-‘Ayyāṭ and his all-girl band.

Those who read WOOF consistently already know how diligently we have endeavored to keep our fellow Americans (and those of you in all those other countries—including Egypt– that show up on our little color-demographic map of followers that WordPress so thoughtfully provides) abreast of how President Obama’s Terrorist Spring initiative is blossoming across the Middle East. You may even recall that one of the basic touchstones by which we’ve measured the administration’s success became the ascension to power in Egypt of the insensate, racist, rabidly anti-Semitic America hater, Mohamed Morsi (briefly renamed Mursi by Reuters and the AP, after which he once again became Morsi). Early in Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at State she went straight to work realizing the president’s dream of a an Arab world united in monolithic detestation of the United States, and this meant dramatic changes in American foreign policy. Two vital salients of this master plan involved jerking the rug violently from under the feet of President Mubarak, our long-time ally in Egypt, and going to (unreported but extremely bloody) war with the government of Libya, where Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, had proved himself a tamely neutral potentate—even going so far as to unilaterally discard his nuclear program as a good faith gesture.

Ronald Reagan going after Gaddafi in 1986

In fact, Gaddafi had been well behaved toward America ever since Ronald Reagan relieved him of his Air Force and about half his Navy back in the ‘80s. But Gaddafi’s neutrality threatened the Obama/Clinton plan for pan-Arabian hostility, and he had to go. Little comprehending the subversive thinking that drove an American administration to arm his Al Qaida-affiliated opponents and drive him from his last stronghold, Gaddafi died slowly, spitting blood and coughing up his last breaths as he was driven around town lashed to the hood of a car while the cheering mob took turns bashing, shooting, or stabbing him. When he was finally pronounced dead, Mrs. Clinton enjoyed one of her occasional spasms of rank loutishness, cackling for the microphones and cameras and bellowing: “We came, we saw, he died!”  It has never been officially reported precisely how many benzodiazepines (or exactly what) are required to put Mrs. Clinton in this annoyingly boisterous condition, but the results are invariably unlovely.

Just dead–Muammar Gaddafi’s passing excited merriment from Her Eminence.

As for Mohammed Morsi, he was (arguably) the legitimate winner of the democratic elections in Egypt following the ouster of Mubarak, the pro-American president given the vaudeville hook by Clinton and Obama—another uncomprehending victim of his own faith in America’s support—a support that was unwavering from the Carter Administration through to the Bush administration, but didn’t amount to mouse droppings in the brave new pan-Sharia-law vision of America’s first anti-American president. To the Obama Regime, a Hamas-affiliated hate merchant at the head of the ultra-venomous Muslim Brotherhood was exactly the right guy for the slot, while most informed observers (with the incomprehensible exception of William Kristol) recognized clearly that Mohammed Morsi was much worse news for the West and for Israel than any previous Egyptian leader, including Nasser—but we digress.

WOOF really likes Bill Kristol, he just seems to be wrong a lot…what’s with that?

Young Mo: The rise to power

Who was this beamish boy who came to power in Cairo with hope in his heart and an all-girl squad of constitutional revisionists on his payroll? What madness drove him to the very crest of events and saw him almost as quickly swallowed by the onrushing tides of the pre-apocalyptic telos? Well, little Mo started off life in the Sharqia Governorate  of  northern Egypt, a lad of humble, provincial origins who spent his childhood in the village of El-Adwah, north of Cairo, while dad farmed the sands and mother swept them out of their small home, and cooked. Adlerian therapists will wish to know that little Mo was the eldest of five brothers, and told journalists that he remembers being taken to school on the back of a donkey. (Not that the donkey part is Adlerian, we just threw that in—it’s a detail.)

Spring–when love was fresh and unblemished by reality.

Mohammed grew to college age and dutifully earned his baccalaureate and masters degrees from Cairo University in the ‘70s.  He then made the cardinal error of attending the University of Southern California in 1982, receiving his PhD and, needless to say, sealing into his weltanschauung a level of glowering anti-Americanism. Like so many other victims of modern American university education, our own president among them, Mohammed Morsi emerged an America-loathing extremist and it was in this frame of mind that he returned to Egypt to serve as the head of the department of engineering at Zagazig University (yes that’s really a place). But even while thus engaged, Morsi found time to get elected to parliament in 2000. He served there until 2005 and then ran for president as an independent candidate, only because the savage Muslim Brotherhood to whom he owed his allegiance was banned from the body politic under Mubarak’s comparatively enlightened rule. Mo lost, but became the chief of the Guidance Office of the Muslim Brotherhood. He became a political prisoner during the bloody beginnings of what the Liberal Establishment Media dubbed “Arab Spring,” even though Egyptians aren’t Arabs, they’re Egyptians, but that’s not important now. An Al Qaida led operation broke Morsi out of jail together with most of his fellow Muslim Brotherhood brothers. This daring-do together with his ballsy cell-phone calls to Al Jazeera sufficed to put Mo in the vanguard of the presidential elections that followed the removal of Mubarak by the Obama-Clinton-Al Qaida cartel.

Following the first round of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential election, Morsi had scooped up 25.5 percent of a widely scattered vote, thus he was officially named the winner and confirmed as Egypt’s new president on 24 June 2012, narrowly beating Mubarak’s former prime minister Ahmed Shafik, whom Morsi denounced during the campaign as “a holdover from the Mubarak-era of secular moderation.” And we were definitely not having any more of that!

Rapture at Foggy Bottom

“With all that that entails!” Her Eminence cozies up.

In Washington, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was elated by these results, as was Our Beloved Helmsman, for they fit perfectly with the master plan of concretizing anti-Americanism, anti-colonialism and rampant anti-Semitism across the region. Her Eminence flew personally to Egypt to embrace the Morsi administration literally and figuratively, declaring that the United States “supports the full transition to civilian rule with all that that entails.” Meanwhile Morsi was busy dispatching his Prime Minister to Gaza to express solidarity with Hamas, vowing to his supporters that “”The Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine….there is no place for them on the land of Palestine,” and calling Jews “blood-suckers”, “warmongers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.”  This did not raise a Clintonian eyebrow as she posed for stately photos with Morsi in the glittery opulence of the presidential palace.

The F-16 Fighting Falcon

Her Eminence added that she was fully supportive of Egypt’s military (which had seized power prior toMorsi’s election) returning “to a purely national security role,” (meaning ‘leave our boy alone, we love him!’) And to emphasize this point while placating his bothersome military, she made Morsi the gift of 200 Abrams Main Battle Tanks and a squadron of F-16s (supersonic jet fighters).  When Morsi further alleged that the Palestinian Authority “was created by the Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will of the Palestinian people and its interests,” Jay Carney explained that the Egyptian maniac had been “taken out of context.” When Morsi re-contextualized his remarks by explaining that “No reasonable person can expect progress [with Israel]. Either you accept the Zionists and everything they want, or else there is war,” Jay Carney explained that, “U.S. policy is focused on actions, not words.”

The quality of Mursi is unconstrained…

Once constitutionally elected, Morsi wasted no time making it plain that he required broad new powers in order to govern, spread Islamic law and extirpate Israel. To lend a hand, TIME magazine, a subversive pop-cultural American weekly deriving its name from a once world-famous periodical published by Henry Luce, dutifully declared Morsi “The most important man in the Middle East.” Morsi agreed. His next move was to quash the Egyptian constitution as written, which he achieved by staying up all night with an all-female quartet of hand-picked constitutional revisionists, rewriting the document to taste while simultaneously removing from the law any checks the Egyptian courts previously possessed against his authority and nullifying the Constituent Assembly.  This infuriated the Egyptians to such an extent that they chased Morsi out of the palace, but he sneaked in again a few days later and re-established himself. At the time, WOOF wondered in these pages: “Will there be any mercy for Mursi (aka Morsi) now that the aroused citizenry is alert to his having turned up again like the proverbial bad Piastre?”

Of course, come to think of it, TIME often makes Bill Kristol look phenomenally accurate.

Well, on the second anniversary of Mubarak’s discomfiture, Morsi, or Mursi, or “Morsy” as President Obama’s news releases inexplicably reference him, was once again subject to  the wrath of the “Arab Street” –let’s call it the Egyptian Street–gathered in Tahrir Square (well, it’s actually a traffic circle but nobody cares).  Like many an overbearing autocrat before him, WOOF’s old nemesis put up a good struggle, but to no avail. Sixty people are dead in the rioting to date, and returns aren’t in from outlying districts. And then there’s the peculiar tradition of raping foreign journalists that began with the beating and rape of American reporter Lara Logan following Mubarak’s overthrow, and was most recently upheld by beating and raping a 22-year-old Dutch journalist on the occasion of Morsi’s ouster. Multiculturally speaking, a local Salafi priest, one Ahmad Mahmoud Abdullah, helpfully explained that women who come to Tahrir Square “have no shame and want to be raped.”

Decline and fall

Morsi’s riot police fielded tear gas, clubs, bullets, and armored cars against the rioters; evidently none of our 200 Abrams tanks got there in time to be put to use in this effort, thus the crowd continued to gain in strength and determination. One protester seemed to personify the spirit of the rebellion when interviewed by Canadian media. Speaking from behind one of those tawdry V-for-Vendetta masks the 19-year old rioter explained (to the extent that he could be understood through the mask), “I will be coming back here every day until the blood of our martyrs is avenged!” Guy Fawkes, however, is not recognized as an Islamic martyr, he being Catholic, and was neither Egyptian nor Arab. Perhaps WOOF is merely waxing stubborn here in its reluctance to recognize the universality of inanity?

But we digress. Last Wednesday, Egypt’s military chief grew weary of the games and informed Morsi that the Egyptian army was deposing him, replacing him with Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who looks like Albert Schweitzer by comparison. Morsi argued, temporized, swore intractable resistance, and then departed quietly, possibly because he knew the army had the Abrams tanks. ElBaradei, however, did not appear as scheduled. Apparently, the ultraconservative Salafi el-Nour party didn’t care for him, possibly due to an anti-rape plank in his presidential platform. Things looked iffy. But Army Chief General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who is anything but, stepped in again and explained the part about Abrams tanks to the Salafi leaders who thereupon withdrew their objections to ElBaradei who was promptly sworn in. In the wake of this occurrence, reports have circulated that ElBaradei’s instillation is in question, but as of now he remains Morsi’s probable successor.

America’s Abrams tank

Where is he today?

Kerry en route to his yacht–waving good-bye to Mo?

And Mo? He remains under house arrest in a military compound. His fate is yet to be decided (but we bet there’s a big trial). The Obama administration is miserable, they having backed Morsi until he fell over. Right up to the last moment Washington issued earnest entreaties and petulant warnings to the Egyptian army to leave their poster boy for Arab Spring in power, and rushed John Kerry (who served briefly in Vietnam before he was against it) to the region where he evinced support for Morsi by sitting in the same glittery chairs that formerly cushioned Her Eminence’s stately posterior. Kerry returned to the U.S., jaw confidently extruded,  to proclaim America’s firm support for the Morsi regime, and went sailing. He was sunning himself aboard his yacht in Nantucket, Massachusetts when the ax fell on the Egyptian despot. Since this looked inexcusably disconnected and –well—stupid, the Obama administration reverted to type and lied, insisting that Secretary of State John Kerry had not been on his boat. Hapless spokesperson Jen Psaki was tapped to inform the press that Kerry had, in fact, “worked around the clock all day,” the redundancy, one guesses, meant to imply veracity. But when CBS released photos of Kerry on his boat at the time of Morsi’s downfall, the Obama administration remembered that Kerry had been, after all, “briefly on his boat.” The entire administration, of course, remains all at sea, and events in post-Morsi Egypt are looking pretty vague too.

Americans can pause here to indulge a pang of heartfelt empathy for the Egyptian Street, because undeniably a degree of parallelism obtains in our situations. Have we not placed our electoral foot in a not dissimilar bucket? If you suppose otherwise, dear readers, consider this remark by Egyptian writer Wael Nawara appearing on the middle-eastern website Al Monitor: “It is not just about the fuel shortages, power outages, deteriorating economy or soaring prices. Western media rarely, if ever, mention the Muslim Brotherhood’s assault on Egyptian identity, culture and way of life as a core cause of the protests.”  That’s okay, Wael—they never mention the assault on our identity, culture and way of life, either!

In happier days!

WOOF reviews “White House Down” without actually going to see it!

WOOF realizes, dear readers, that some of you become upset with us when we review movies without actually going to see them, but seeing them in some cases strikes us as ill-advised, and in any case, as many of you are aware, we are always reluctant to leave the WOOF cave and dodge the drones. The difficulty in this case is mainly logistical (read: drones), because who wouldn’t want to see a film that CNN acclaimed as “satisfyingly stupid”?  Reviewer Chris Nashawaty went on to write of Director Roland Emmerich that, “Seriously. It takes a certain kind of genius to crank out blockbusters as spectacularly silly as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012.”  And WOOF does not beg to differ. We are also aware that the “trades” are chalking off White House Down as a colossal flop, eaten alive by Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock in Heat, a lovable assortment of computer-generated characters in Pixar’s Monsters University, and one other picture, but we forget which one. Anyway, it’s running in fourth place and that means the film’s chances of “earning out” (as we say in show biz) are practically nil. WOOF is indifferent to such crass details, however, and persists in reporting on art for art’s sake.

“A certain kind of genius.” Director Emmerich, eyes always left, searching for inspiration.

So what about White House Down earned it our specific interest? Well, because until President Obama gets his own Saturday morning cartoon show (do they still have those? Probably not, come to think of it) or is fully restyled as a revolutionary he-man by the Liberal Establishment Media, this is the closest look we have at how the Left’s perceptions of the president clash with reality; because, as you may already be aware, the movie features Jamie Foxx as Dear Leader, shooting shoulder-fired missiles and running about with a firm grip on a Colt .45 automatic. Don’t take our word for it, check out the publicity stills—and note the distinction between the presidential image confected by Director Emmerich and his band of liberal screenwriters and thespians, and the actual Barack, brandishing an ultra-expensive (and apparently recoilless) Italian shotgun in his notorious skeet-shooting photo.  Isn’t this a discrepancy worthy of mention? Well, obviously we thought so. The president, after all, has killed a lot of people, but he does it with drones—and you can’t get out of a White House taken over by terrorists by deploying drones, because, quite literally, the ceiling is too low.

Lest we forget!

Now, lest anyone be concerned, the terrorists who take over the White House in the movie are not Arabs and not Islamic—they are, predictably, that rare breed of white, right-wing, German-led terrorist observed only in Hollywood movies—and always in Hollywood movies, unless Eastern Europeans get the gig.  And although he has a Lincoln fetish, a Michelle-style wife and two daughters who drive home Foxx’s true identity (President Obama, obviously!) he is coyly referred to as President “James Sawyer” so that the Hollywood Left can claim plausible deniability—especially now that the picture seems to be tanking. Beyond this we are provided with a Rush Limbaugh stand-in who is revealed to be vile, disingenuous and racist, and what “Big Hollywood” reviewer Christian Toto calls “unrelenting liberal propaganda” from start to finish.

More than one Rush? Film discovers radio host’s evil twin!

Apparently, understanding the plot requires nothing more than having already viewed Die Hard, so numerous are the similarities; and the film so exactly recreates an earlier 2013 release entitled Olympus Has Fallen, that only the Obama angle and the blockbuster budget distinguish it. But understanding White House Down as political mythmaking requires that we give you a blow by blow description of events, so you can identify the hero and the bad guy …No, not any of the terrorists, they’re just mercenaries—we mean the real bad guy.

First some background: President “Sawyer” has a wonderful plan, referred to throughout the film as his “peace plan.” He’s going to pull all American troops out of the Middle East. Here we see a true glimmer of the Obama mystique, at least as perceived in those heady days of yesteryear when Our Beloved Helmsman was “advanced” the Nobel Peace Prize on the expectation of pending performances, and widely perceived as a man who would withdraw America from battle wherever offered or encountered.  In this simple-minded vision, America is the cause of destabilization and unrest everywhere on the planet, so it will require only our absence to ensure felicity and calm across the entire Arab world– and yet, as the film soon reveals, certain right-wing, tea party, military-industrial fanatics are opposed to the idea (you know, peace and all) and begin to plot in secrecy.

Meanwhile, our other hero, played by Channing Tatum has just flunked his audition for the Secret Service, but is taking his daughter Emily (played by Joey King) on the White House tour (which is apparently re-established despite dread sequestration cuts) when ka-boom! The politically-correct white right-wing terrorists attack!

Capitol destroyed–more of Roland Emmerich’s odd passion for blasting historic icons.

The bomb actually goes off at the Capitol Building, but this places the White House on lockdown, giving the devious head of the President’s security detail (James Woods) a chance to get the president to a safe room and then gun down the other Secret Service agents because he, James Woods, is a traitor!  (Just like that trusted security chief in Air Force One, remember? Imagine our shock and amazement.) The white, right-wing terrorists are led by a white, right-wing German named Emil Stenz (Jason Clarke), and he and his killer elite have little trouble knocking off the rest of the Secret Service and taking over the White House, at which point they begin utilizing the White House computer system to initiate nuclear strikes against a whole bunch of innocent countries where peaceful Arabs live.

The other hero–Channing Tatum. But we don’t think this still is from the same film.

So, Channing Tatum grabs a gun and starts killing the terrorists, fighting his way into the White House (where daughter Emily is trapped because she was using the bathroom when the lockdown occurred), and while he’s at it, he rescues President Obama—we mean Sawyer. But Sawyer/Obama is a game dude, and he excels at running, shooting, and firing rockets at the heavies as Tatum leads him toward rescue. Of course, while rescuing the president, Tatum loses his daughter again and she gets captured by the terrorists, so the president nobly gives himself up to the bad guys (how like him!) in exchange for Emily …sort of like in Die Hard except that was the hero’s wife, not his daughter, but one must allow for creative differences.

Okay, suffice it that Tatum finally gets his hands on the leader of the terrorists and blows him up—but during this spasm the president gets recaptured and is forced to activate the nuclear codes after which he is clearly shot point blank, but not to worry—the bullet is actually stopped by a pocket watch that was somehow handed down to him by Abraham Lincoln. Ahhh, take a moment to savor the poesy in this event, gentle readers!  Meanwhile, Channing Tatum crashes through the wall in a presidential security vehicle and kills Stenz with a mini-gun.

Jenkins plays an evil, though more resourceful, less cunctative version of Speaker Boehner.

Anyhow, guess who turns out to be the criminal master mind behind everything? Why, the Speaker of the House—the leader of the “opposition party”…the knuckle-dragging Neanderthalic  Republican– or, in other words, John Boehner as portrayed by actor Richard Jenkins. Except they don’t call him John Boehner, that would be too obvious. He is hell bent on stopping the peace process by seizing power, and since Sawyer was thought dead and the Vice President was blown out of the sky, (we skipped that part), Boehner, whom the film calls Eli Raphelson, is now the apparent president. His aim is to send troops swarming back into the Middle East, which is a bit odd considering that he is simultaneously conspiring to nuke most of it, but you know those haters! However, this vile little RINO reckoned without Channing Tatum being on the scene, and didn’t figure on President Sawyer being equipped with Honest Abe’s magic, bullet-stopping watch!  Obama (that is, Sawyer) directs that Boehner (we mean Raphelson) be taken into custody for attempting a coup d’état…and blowing up a lot of the White House and the Capitol…and shooting down the Vice President…and stuff.

The events described above, by the way, originated, if that word is even vaguely apposite, in a film shot from a script by Producer James Vanderbilt, who sold his scenario to Sony for 3 million dollars—so don’t give up out there, struggling script writers!

James “Magic Fingers” Vanderbilt was paid three million for the script–maybe it looked better on paper?

So why is WOOF bothering with this film, filled with calisthenics for your eyeballs and clichés mined from more than a dozen films featuring white terrorists attacking the president or some other American institution, plus about eight seasons of 24? Because the Liberal parallax view absorbs us and awes us in its insularity from anything real.

Who could reasonably, at this point, link the Obama image to peace in the Middle East? Who could possibly conceive a president who can’t throw a baseball or shoulder a 12-gauge demonstrating adroitness with a semi-automatic handgun, or any of the other ordinance he appears to manipulate in Emmerich’s film? How is withdrawing American troops from the field, somehow Lincolnesque?  How does the Lincoln comparison ever really function in the Obama ethos? Why would Russia, China and Iran all agree to President Sawyer’s “Peace Plan” after learning of his macho performance in confronting the terrorists—but not have greeted it with cynical encomia initially? Why does Israel finally approve of it also? Why does France need to approve of it at all?  And does anybody truly conceptualize John Boehner as the living simulacrum of Ernst Stavro Blofeld? …Really? …C’mon, really?

Even arch super villains have feelings, ya know!

In Hollywood there is a long-lived incongruence between the endless flower-childhood of its denizens and the extraordinary visions of violence and mayhem they create repeatedly for the screen—so how do filmmakers make Barack Obama appear heroic? By having him grab a pistol and do things the real Obama would attribute to “bitter clingers,” and yet, by the very issuance of such imagineered flapdoodle, lending the whole notion a sense of wide-screen verisimilitude. That this is how they make Obama seem heroic to themselves is further evidence of the maladaptive nature of the Hollywood psyche…ever split between didactic pacifism and Homeric teleologies. But to make this film succeed on a grand scale would have required a grandeur attributable only to the blank-slate Obama of 2007-8—the unsullied template—the man about whom we could believe anything we wished, because he was cool, and he stood for hope and change—possibly the two most deliberately ambiguous concepts in the history of American politics. Yes, we might have bought it in those days before the baseballs, the skeet shoot, the tantrums, the corpse-man gaffe, the pouting, and that peculiarly Obamian style of governance that everywhere creates division, decline, and ruination but invariably denies responsibility for any of it.

“Obama” and his .45: No more skeet for this guy–this time, it’s personal!

Today, the movie appears to be bombing (forgive us), and this fact mystifies the critics who flattered it and the producers who assumed it would earn epic returns. Maybe this is because the fates were cruel to Sony Pictures, or maybe this is because the image of Barack the gunslinger is simply untenable out there in movie-going America. Anxious to regain some ground, Sony is throwing open the doors of theaters showing their flop to anyone with a military ID on the Fourth of July.  In England, The Guardian suggests that, “If White House Down has upset any members of the US military, Sony’s decision to offer veterans and current armed forces servicemen free entry to see the film on…U.S. Independence day might help to turn the tide.” But what tide is that? Even the Guardian must realize that giving seats away for free will not increase earnings, and you can bet your boots Sony does. No, Sony is just burning off a bit of bad karma—but at this point, everyone’s gone–gone to go watch Monsters University. We hear it’s boffo… and considerably less implausible! 

Striking a blow for reality in theaters everywhere!