Free Frank Warner

The South Park message: Anti-Mormon bigots, grow up

If you engage in the lazy bigotry of making fun of Mormons, you might ask yourself if, in mixed company, you speak the same way about other religions.

And if there is a religion you don’t make fun of, you might ask yourself why. After all, every religion has at least one fundamental article of faith that defies reason and logic. Then again, if you make fun of all people of faith, if you feel good calling them narrow-minded and stupid, you might look in the mirror for the moron with the narrow mind.

That old South Park cartoon episode, “All About Mormons,” summed up my philosophy toward the people who imagine themselves morally and intellectually superior to Mormons.

High and mighty. In that show, which highlighted the Mormons’ many irrational beliefs, young Stan has fun hanging out with Gary, the new Mormon kid in South Park Elementary School, but Stan still decides to shun Gary because it just isn’t cool to associate with a Mormon.

Gary figures it out. He finally tells Stan:

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.

That says it.

Frank Warner

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Update: CNN's John King calls Romney "Governor Mormon."

Abbottabad files: Osama bin Laden watches self on TV

The mass-murdering glory hog.

Newly released video shows Osama bin Laden watching himself on TV at his lair in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The Navy SEALs took away his remote control.

Frank Warner

Looking forward to the last episode of 'Big Love'

The HBO series "Big Love," about a semi-Mormon polygamist family, has been unlike any other TV series before it. The ending this Sunday has got to be powerful. It had better be.

And I'm really going to miss Jeanne Tripplehorn.

Frank Warner

NPR Schillers itself -- they're all fired

If anyone had any doubt that National Public Radio is a wing of the Democratic Party, the comments by Ron Schiller, top executive of NPR's nonprofit foundation, has made it clear once and for all.

Let's just hope this ends the taxpayer funding to the partisan broadcast network. American taxpayers should not fund any news media aimed at Americans. It is the opposite of a free press.

Voice of America is fine, because it aims the message of freedom at people in oppressed nations. But the U.S. government should have no direct hand in the American free press, except to protect it.

Misplaced tolerance. How Republicans allowed public funding of NPR this long will always be a mystery to me. Would Democrats have tolerated subsidies to a similarly Republican-inclined news organ? Not a chance.

Republicans also let the Democrats take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that made no sense either. Stupidity, vanity and corruption, I guess.

Frank Warner

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Update March 9: NPR CEO Vivian Schiller resigns. Why? She was doing what NPR listeners want: keeping NPR 100 percent Democratic pure. She is no relation to Ron Schiller, except that they are both Democrats.

Update March 10: Joyce Slocum, NPR interim CEO, also is 100 percent Democrat.

Jack LaLanne dead at 96

I remember watching Jack LaLanne on early-morning TV about 50 years ago. There he was doing jumping jacks. (According to CBS News, jumping jacks were named after him!) On many mornings, he got me jumping before school.

LaLanne recently contracted pneumonia. He died today in his Morro Bay, California, home. He was 96. Until his recent sickness, he was still doing jumping jacks. He worked out 2 hours every day.

LaLanne said last year, "I can't die. It would ruin my image." Well, no. My image of him always will be as the cheerful man exercising at dawn, encouraging children and their parents to do the same in front of their TVs.

Frank Warner

Keith Olbermann likes Democrats? Shocker!

MSNBC has suspended Keith Olbermann for giving campaign contributions to three Democratic candidates. MSNBC President Phil Griffin says it was the first time ever he noticed any sign that Olbermann favored one political party over another.

Frank Warner

Jon Stewart thinks Keith Olbermann is a blowhard

At his rally for Democrats on two days ago in Washington, Jon Stewart took a shot at MSNBC's Keith Olbermann with a video strongly suggesting that Olbermann does as much fear-mongering and name-calling as the talking heads on Fox News and CNN.

Now Olbermann is all bent out of shape, complaining that Stewart went too far. Olbermann even tweeted with some fear-mongering and name-calling:

"I thought his [Stewart's] message, on the eve of an election full of Tea Psychos, was terribly timed."

Stewart ended his "Rally for Sanity" rock show/comedy show/Democrats echo-chamber on the Mall on a civilly serious note by declaring that, despite our disagreements, most Americans get along well every day of the week. He again blamed the 24-hour-a-day news media for trying to polarize the nation. He even said the Tea Party isn't racist.

'Jumped a shark.' Stewart's speech seemed out of character for a comedian whose fake news show reserves 90 percent of its mockery and criticism for anyone who challenges Democratic Party orthodoxy. Either he has noticed the Democrats are rife with corruption and incompetence, or he wants to broaden his TV audience. But Olbermann took Stewart's flirtation with even-handedness as treason.

Olberman said Stewart had "jumped a shark" -- had blundered into a career-ending stunt.

I don't think Stewart jumped a shark. I think it was "jumping the idiot," and the idiot didn't notice.

Frank Warner

Jon Stewart’s interview of President Obama: Did we expect sanity?

Everyone had high expectations when President Obama went on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.”

Somehow Obama and Stewart would show how the Republicans are to blame for the failed near-$1 trillion stimulus, the $1 trillion in bad loans at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the economic disruptions from the $1 trillion health-care plan.

Somehow they would show that national-security domestic wiretappings had stopped, that terrorist-prisoner renditions were no more, that no American is targeted for assassination, and that Guantanamo prison really is closed.

The seriously impossible. Somehow they would prove the Iraq war freed no one, but we stole the oil. They would show the Democrats spent less on the Iraq war than the Republicans. They would show the BP oil spill was handled so much better than Hurricane Katrina. They would even convince us the unemployment rate is falling.

And somehow Obama and Stewart would be funny.

Everyone was disappointed. There were no witty nuggets of wisdom, no stunning revelations. Much of the interview was sweaty-clammy awkward. Funny? Not much.

Obama: “In fairness, Larry Summers did a heckuva job.”

Stewart: “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.”

“You’re coming from a place, you ran on a very high rhetoric: ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ And the Democrats this year seem to be running on ‘Please, baby, one more chance.’ Are you disappointed in how it’s gone?”

Obama: “You know, when I won and we started the transition, a whole bunch of my political folks came up and said, enjoy this now, because two years from now, folks are going to be frustrated, and that is in fact what happened. … [But] we prevented the second Great Depression. We have passed historic health care reform, historic financial regulatory reform. We have done things that some folks don’t even know about.”

Stewart: “What have you done we don’t know about? Are you planning a surprise party for us?”

Obama: “Over and over again, we have moved forward an agenda that is making a difference in people’s lives every day. Now is it enough? No.”

Stewart: “You’re talking about a list of accomplishments that you’re feel very proud of. The Democratic Party, they don’t seem to be running on the list of accomplishments. Have you convinced your own party that the legislative progress has been enough?

Obama: “Let me say this about members of Congress. …”

Stewart: “Are you going to curse?”

Obama: “No, I’m not going to curse. There are a bunch of folks who, during the course of this year, took a lot of tough votes that they knew were bad politics, because they thought they were the right things to do.”

Stewart: “Is the difficulty that you have here the distance between what you ran on and what you delivered? You ran with such, if I may, audacity.... yet legislatively it has felt timid at times. I’m not sure at times what you even want out of a health-care bill.”

Obama: “Jon, I love your show, but this is something where I have a profound disagreement with you and I don’t want to lump you in with a lot of other pundits. What happens is it gets discounted because the presumption is, well, we didn’t get 100 percent of what we wanted, we got 90 percent of what we wanted -- so let’s focus on the 10 percent we didn’t get.

“Right now there is a woman in New Hampshire who doesn’t have to sell her house to get her cancer treatments because of that health-care bill. She doesn’t think it’s inconsequential.”

Stewart: “The suggestion was not that it’s inconsequential.”

Obama: “Your suggestion was that it was timid.”

Stewart: “Timid…. and I don’t mean to lump you in with other presidents.

“You ran on the idea that this system needed basic reform. It feels like some of the reforms that have passed, like health care, have been done in a very political manner that has papered over a foundation that is corrupt.”

Obama: “That I think is fair. Over the last two years, in an emergency situation, our basic attitude was we’ve got to get some things done, in some cases quickly, [and] in order to do that [we] basically worked with the process as opposed to transformed the process, and that has frustrated folks. It frustrates me.”

Stewart: “The expectation, I think, was audacity going in there and really rooting out a corrupt system, and so the sense is, has [the] reality of what hit you in the face when you first stepped in caused you to back down from some of the more visionary things?”

Obama: “My attitude is if we’re making progress, step by step, inch by inch, day by day, that we are being true to the spirit of that campaign.”

Stewart: “You wouldn’t say you’d run this time as a pragmatist? It wouldn’t be, ‘Yes we can, given certain conditions?’”

Obama: “I think what I would say is yes we can, but …”

Stewart: [Laughs]

Obama: “But it’s not going to happen overnight.”

Tense. Seriously tense. It makes you wonder how much fun Stewart’s Washington, D.C., rally will be today. "Today we rally around our timid president."

I couldn't help but notice how Stewart applies the pseudo-liberal assumption that benefits come from nowhere. He appears to believe that the wealth that fuels progress and the progress that creates wealth come from the wave of a magic wand or from free money or from another no-cost loan from China. It’s irresponsible politics, and inevitably it’s destructive. Just look at Fannie and Freddie (which are exempt from the "historic financial regulatory reform").

In the end, Stewart's laughable politics undermines his humor. Even an insane joke needs some connection to reality -- to sanity.

I wonder why Stewart didn’t ask the president, “OK, you’ve borrowed and spent at least half a trillion and stimulated no new jobs. How much money do you think you’d have to borrow and spend before the unemployment rate dropped? Why don’t you propose borrowing and spending another half trillion? You’ve committed taxpayers to $1 trillion in extra health-care costs over the next 10 years. Why didn’t you commit to $2 trillion in extra costs? Why not? Why not do more unbelieveably expensive things that don't work?”

That seemed to be where Stewart was going. Funny he didn’t ask, but not that funny.

Frank Warner

Ross Douthat: ‘South Park’ censorship reveals cowardice and self-loathing

Ross Douthat, in The New York Times, explains that the successful targeting of “South Park” by the Islamist fringe has unveiled the West as a fragile civilization too willing to surrender its freedom.

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It’s no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” because it included a scene featuring Muhammad’s severed head. Or Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet’s third wife. Or Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons ... in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians — the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands — have been hauled before courts and “human rights” tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam.

But there’s still a sense in which the “South Park” case is particularly illuminating. Not because it tells us anything new about the lines that writers and entertainers suddenly aren’t allowed to cross. But because it’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. …

Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.

Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.

For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

Indeed. And who expected to see this in The New York Times?

Frank Warner

Insult to ‘South Park’: Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee should apologize

If you can’t figure out why the right to offend is as important as the right of free speech, consider the warning that “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have received over their cartoon depiction of Muhammad in a bear suit.

“We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show,” [Abu Talhah] Al-Amrikee wrote. “This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”

Al-Amrikee, a New York resident and admirer of Osama bin Laden, posted the warning – with a photograph of a dead Van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker shot and stabbed in 2004 for his film about Muslim women – on the Web site RevolutionMuslim.com.

The best offense. We can believe it’s better to avoid offending people, that it’s better to avoid ruffling feathers. But that can’t be the rule. There is no right not to be offended. If there were, no old idea could be challenged, not even the worst idea. Stone and Parker happen to be masters at offending with a point. They should be saluted.

The cartoonists’ point might be simply to make people laugh. It might be to smoke out the self-righteous among us who falsely believe their way is the only way. And their point might be that sometimes free speech takes courage.

Al-Amrikee said the “South Park” episode “outright insulted” Muhammad. It’s unfortunate that might have upset some people. But in combining his indignation with a photo of Theo Van Gogh dead, Al-Amrikee more deeply insults all of us who hold freedom dear.

Al-Amrikee is a disgrace.

Frank Warner