Just to illustrate the level of hysteria that has been reached, I want you to rehear this, about a minute and a half. It’s from the Situation Room last night with Wolf Blitzer, and a reporterette is Carol Costello, and you will hear voices, one of the voices Devin Gordon of Newsweek and James Carafano of Heritage — you’ll also hear me in this. One of the things they discuss in the “24” seminar that the Heritage Foundation sponsored and I moderated — and it had some cast members, it had the two creators, had the lead writer and it had two think tank guys, one from a liberal think tank and Carafano from the Heritage Foundation discussing. All they would have to do, CNN has broadcast this, CNN sells a DVD of this — war profiteering, by the way. All they have to do is watch it! The producers, the writers have explained during the seminar, what they do, how they go about it. It’s like that never happened. “No, we gotta sit here and make it up. We gotta sit here and try to tell people that they are profiteering, that they are propagandizing, that they are trying to instill fear in the minds and hearts of the American people to support the Bush administration, and this is unconscionable.”
Of course, it’s fine to make idiotic movies like Algore and pollute the minds of little kids, skulls full of mush in grade school, for crying out loud, about the myth and lie of human-caused global warming. It’s okay for Hollywood to make war profiteering — Stephen Spielberg, Schindler’s list, anyone? How about Clinton Eastwood, Flags of Our Fathers, Envelopes of Our Fathers, whatever the hell. What was Commander-in-Chief? For crying out loud, ABC does a prime-time television show that bombed, but it was all about Hillary Clinton as president, that’s fine, we can condition the American people to accept Hillary or a woman has president, fine. We can even give this actress, Geena Davis, awards as though she’s president, the UN actually did, but that’s fine, that’s just entertainment. How about this stupid environmental wacko movie, The Day After Tomorrow where the whole world floods and astronauts are flying around, “Boy, you know, the earth has never looked cleaner after the US has been wiped out. And the president, a Dick Cheney look alike has to relocate to Mexico where our good friends the Mexicans give us life.
It’s okay to make that garbage and to say that’s just entertainment when everybody knows Hollywood is being used to try to influence hearts and minds, and by the way that’s one of the reasons the box office sucks. That’s not what people want out of their entertainment. So anyway, this seminar, it’s available, it was broadcast on C-SPAN live, people could have watched it. Of course, liberals can’t be forced to do that, because that would force them to have to deal with reality rather than to make up all these scenarios. Here’s the report.
COSTELLO: Is it, as Newsweek magazine calls it, “a neocon sex fantasy”?
GORDON: “24” is just your worst nightmares realized. If “24” is true then everything the neoconservatives have been saying all along is true.
COSTELLO: As in a terrorist network working inside the United States —
RUSH: Stop the tape! It’s happened, Carol. It’s happening now. We’ve blown up the rings. Have you ever heard of the 19 hijackers of 9/11? There are terrorist rings operating in this country, and they have.
COSTELLO: — sending suicide bombers to subways and shopping malls, ordering up dirty bombs assembled right in California.
RUSH: Stop the tape! What about the flight schools, Carol babe, where the guys are going to school in Florida and Arizona and they’re telling the instructors, “We don’t really care about how to land. We just want to know how to fly these things,” to use our airplanes to blow up our buildings? Do you think “24” is so far out of the realm of possibility? Does everybody forget that 9/11 happened and how? Now she’s talking here about Jack Bauer.
COSTELLO: A hero, Jack Bauer, who is decent like John Wayne, yet often ignores international law, torturing terrorist to get vital information.
CARAFANO: Jack Bauer is kind of a metaphor for all the great people that we have out there every day really are, you know, working hard to make us safe.
COSTELLO: The Heritage Foundation so admires “24”‘s plots, its group sponsored a forum in June called “24” and America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism, Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter? On the panel, terrorism experts, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
COSTELLO: Also invited, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who so loves “24” he’s posted a review of this season on his website.
RUSH: Stop the tape! Who cares, Carol? Have I committed a crime? The fact that I’ve posted a review, see, to them proves that I have taken over Hollywood, or at least if not taken over, I have infiltrated Hollywood. This can’t stand. They own Hollywood. It’s enough they’ve lost radio, and I’ll tell you what, bring back the blacklists and put me on it. By the way, I wasn’t invited to attend. I moderated it, Carol. Justice Thomas is married to Ginny who works at the Heritage Foundation. He was in the audience watching. The place was sold out. It was full! Sell tickets or not, it was in the Reagan Building. Why don’t you mention that? An auditorium at the Reagan building. That would really shake the rest of you up.
RUSH ARCHIVE: I am literally in awe of the creativity of the brains behind the program.
COSTELLO: Feeling the neocon love of the program, possible presidential candidate John McCain made a guest appearance on “24” last season. The Heritage Foundation wants to make it clear it believes “24” is in the end just a TV show, but its hero, Jack Bauer, does for the 9/11 generation what James Bond did for the Cold War generation.
RUSH: So? So what? At any rate, the audio and video of this Heritage Foundation seminar, moderated, led, and directed and steered by me is now posted at my website. It’s up there and it’s on the free side and I just want to warn you, a little disclaimer here, the Heritage Foundation video which is what we’ve posted wasn’t the best. We eventually replaced it with the C-SPAN version of the video, but we got the perfunctory C-SPAN lawyer letter saying cease or desist or you die, because they sell a DVD of the program which their cameras also televised, they’re selling it for $29.99, which according to Craig Crawford of Congressional Quarterly, it would be war profiteering.
We had to take down the C-SPAN video, but the bottom line is the video that’s up there works, it’s not the best quality, but there is audio. If you don’t like the video and all else fails, there’s a transcript up there. But despite these disclaimers and warnings, I know I’m going to get complaints about the video. I know I’m going to get complaints about the video. It always happens. I’m just saying, go ahead and complain but I’m not replying because I have warned you. At any rate, folks, video is not that good. The Heritage did it, and I don’t know what went wrong or if anything did, but it’s just not the best and we’re not presenting it as the best. The audio is perfectly fine.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mr. Snerdley has just reminded me, how could we forget this? Do you remember the Murphy Brown controversy with Dan Quayle? Murphy Brown was a single mother working in some newsroom, TV newsroom, and she was an unwed mother. Quayle called CBS, “This is not good for the moral?” and the left was livid, the left was outraged, “How dare you criticize? Why, that’s Candace Bergen, how dare you? Quayle, who the hell are you? You’re just the vice president. Shut up. You can’t tell us what we can do in Hollywood. This is just judgment.”
It wasn’t long after that Candace Bergen actually agreed with what Quayle had said, after the series ended, I think, she actually agreed with it. The point is that they raged about that for months. They raged about it for months. Now here comes “24”, and it’s just typical. These people, biggest hypocrites. One of my favorite shows is Boston Legal, and that may surprise some of you because Boston Legal routinely mocks and makes fun of conservatives. Denny Crane, my favorite character on this show played by William Shatner, is the lone conservative on it, and he’s the biggest buffoon on the face of the earth. I would no more suggest that Boston Legal shut down or change Denny Crane’s character, because I laugh. I can laugh at myself and I can laugh at conservatism, and taking all this stuff so seriously is just what amazes me, but this is an industry the libs — it’s like education. They own it. Anybody that tries to muscle in on them is going to be destroyed.