Print

When I started writing J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review as a daily column, 41 days ago, I worried that I would not be able to find enough to write a new column every day.

My worries were unnecessary. I’ve done it. But I’ve cheated.

I’ve serialized the introduction and first ten chapters of my book-in-progress, Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto, to fill up eleven of those columns; and I’ve taken several pieces I first wrote for my Facebook friends and updated them for publication here.

I’ve also uploaded into this column’s “strategic reserve” another Facebook piece, four previously published “Classic J. Neil” articles, and the forematter and first two chapters of my unpublished book manuscript, I Met God. So if I find myself unable to write a new column for any reason — travel, illness, or other pressing duties — I can maintain the daily continuity. Among print newspaper columnists this is called putting columns “on the spike.”

If I’ve found anything, since I started writing this column, it’s that on any given day there’s far more variety in what I can write about than I can cover if I stick to a rule of one topic for each day.

So, every once in a while, I’m going to do a “catch up” news commentary which I’ll be titling The Nobeus News Report. If you say “Nobeus News” aloud you’ll get the joke.

Here we go.

Al Gore and the Gangrene Movement

The East Anglia emails which show that not only has there been no global warming but that the earth has been experiencing global cooling, have barely had any impact on Oscar-winner and Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore’s continued campaign to cripple the American economy by forcing Americans to forgo cheap and domestically plentiful fossil-fuel energy in favor of solar, wind, and geothermal sources of energy that are not yet on the market.

I’m all in favor of going green, if by green you mean adding additional sources of clean energy onto the menu. I’d be off-grid in a heartbeat with my own solar and wind power if it was something I could pick up at Walmart, set out in my yard, and plug in to my house. That’s the sort of green energy that my friend Kent Hastings’ blog Permakent is all about.

But Al Gore’s carbon-jackboot on my neck isn’t Green. It’s Gangrene. It’s high time we made the distinction.

Last week David Letterman spent a half hour asking Gore leading questions about global warming and overpopulation so fawning that even Al Gore seemed embarrassed. And, of course, not a single mention of the Anglia scandal.

It reminded me of the scene in the 1967 sex comedy A Guide for the Married Man, in which Robert Morse’s philandering husband character advises a wannabe philanderer played by Walter Matthau to “Deny, deny, deny!” We’re given a comedy sketch of a husband caught by his wife in bed with another woman, who simply pretends it never happened. He answers all her accusations saying “What?” while he and his mistress dress and make the bed, and by the time the mistress is out the door and he’s seated in his chair asking his wife “What’s for dinner?” the wife doubts her own sanity and starts cooking.

Of course outright lying is not excluded from the Gore repertoire. Today he claimed that the Anglia emails are all ten years old and therefore irrelevant to the Copenhagen Conference. Bull shit. The most recent of the whistleblower-released emails is only weeks old.

I wonder how long it will take the Boston Globe‘s Ellen Goodman to write that Al Gore’s denials of the Climate Fraud are “on a par with Holocaust deniers,” as she tarred us skeptics on February 3, 2007.

I’m not holding my carbon-dioxide-polluting breath.

#

Cheney Reaction

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show yesterday, and during the course of that interview Mr. Cheney said of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to bring Guantanamo Bay prisoners to New York City for a civilian trial, “I think it’ll give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Now, the phrase “aid and comfort to the enemy” is not your average term of art, and it would be impossible to believe that the former Vice President isn’t aware of its origin. Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution of the United States reads, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

So yesterday the former Vice President of the United States accused the current Attorney General of the United States — and by implication his boss, the President of the United States — of treason.

Historically when a former official makes a charge of treason against a current official, it’s considered an act of sedition — or at least cause for a duel to the death.

These days the reaction is: *Yawn*.

I’m not one of those who, like many of the left, thought Dick Cheney was the very devil, only because I’ve read the Constitution and noted that the only actual power a sitting Vice President of the United States has — aside from being transported to a secure location any time the President might be in danger — is to break a tie vote as President of the Senate. So anything nefarious that Dick Cheney did while he was President George W. Bush’s Vice President, as far as I’m concerned, gets blamed on President George W. Bush. Any of President Bush’s cabinet appointments had more actual authority than Dick Cheney. The average undersecretary had more actual authority under any chain of command than Cheney.

George Washington’s Vice President, John Adams, described it as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Vice President Truman called his office, “about as useful as a cow’s fifth teat.” Humorist Finley Peter Dunne was quoted in the movie Advise and Consent for his quip, “Being vice president is not a crime exactly. You can’t be sent to jail for it, but it’s kind of a disgrace.”

One is therefore reminded of the reply William F. Buckley, Jr., made to my friend Brad Linaweaver when Brad told the practicing Roman Catholic that he was a lapsed Episcopalian. Said Buckley: “That’s not going very far, Mr. Linaweaver.”

So Dick Cheney going from the powerlessness of being Vice President to the irrelevancy of being a former Vice President — without even the comforts of former Vice President Al Gore’s Academy Award and Nobel Peace Prize — is likewise not going very far.

When it comes to his opinions being completely irrelevant, Dick Cheney must be finding out that he is uncomfortably close to being — well — me.

#

What If Nicole Brown Had Been Tried for O.J. Simpson’s Murder?

I wrote a book in 1999 about the O.J. Simpson case titled The Frame of the Century? In that book I dissect the evidence brought out in both trials and show that the molehill, rather than mountain, of evidence against the Heisman Trophy winner may indicate that Simpson may have walked into the crime scene before the police arrived, but there is no evidence that he was the killer. I show in my book how even this conclusion could have been part of a frame-up of Simpson by the actual murderer — and suggest an individual with the means, opportunity, and possible motive to have done it — and my friend, William C. Dear, has produced an award-winning documentary, The Overlooked Suspect, giving even stronger evidence that the Brentwood-adjacent murders might have been committed by O.J. Simpson’s oldest son from his first marriage, Jason Simpson.

The murder conviction in an Italian court of cute American blonde Amanda Knox now has Bill O’Reilly, United States Senator Maria Cantwell, CBS 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all willing to consider that she might be innocent.

By contrast, O.J. Simpson, who was actually acquitted in his criminal trial, is still regarded as guilty.

This makes me think that if the Bruno Magli had been on the other foot, and the gorgeous blonde Nicole had been tried on similar evidence for her black ex-husband’s murder, Nicole Brown’s conviction would have left less of a public verdict of guilt than Simpson’s acquittal did.

Say it with me: double standard.

There is more sympathy for the convicted murderer Amanda Knox in the American media — because she’s fuckable — than there is for the Oscar-winning Polish Jew Roman Polanski, whose plea bargain in an American court for sex with an underage woman was so contaminated by judicial misconduct that even his alleged victim, Samantha Geimer, wants him freed.

Update October 3, 2011: The above few statements by me about the Amanda Knox case are among the most misguided I’ve ever written, and it shows how trial-by-media can contaminate perceptions to the point of insanity. When I wrote these statements I had no idea — because it was never reported in media I had access to — that the Italian prosecution of Knox was a frame-up by a psychotic prosecutor who choreographed the manufacture of incriminating evidence and the destruction of exculpatory evidence.

I’m ashamed of what I wrote and am happy today to repudiate my dishonorable vilification of Amanda Knox. I applaud the Italian retrial that has exonerated her.

I do believe, however, that if Texas investigator Bill Dear’s evidence were ever examined by the major media they could likewise conclude that the coverage of O.J. Simpson has been similarly mangled by the major media.

–J. Neil Schulman

#

You’ve Just Crossed Over To … The Gun-Free Zone

It’s now been 36 days since disarmed soldiers and civilians were massacred and wounded by a single gunman on Fort Hood, and it’s been 30 days since I revealed in my November 11th column that a Clinton Administration revision to Department of Defense Directive 5210.56 — Army Regulation 190-14, dated 12 March 1993 — removed from base commanders the power to authorize arming soldiers under their command and transferred crippled authority to the politically-appointed Secretary of the Army with standards paralleling the Clinton Administration’s civilian pro-gun-control agenda.

When I first wrote about Army Regulation 190-14 I failed to note that the document was marked “declassified.” I only recently figured out that this means when the Clinton Administration first issued that new regulation they did it in secret.

President Obama, in his only speech to the United Stated Military Academy at West Point on December 1, 2009, made no mention of Fort Hood. Nor has the White House announced any revision of Army Regulation 190-14 that would allow base commanders to arm soldiers on base to harden their vulnerability to attack.

Meanwhile, on December 4, 2009, the Faculty Council at Colorado State University recommended to CSU President Tony Frank to ban firearms on campus, over the objection of the student government which asked Frank to leave the current policy which permits holders of Concealed-Carry Firearms licenses to carry on campus. This Faculty Council joins those in 49 states — Utah being the only exception — which after repeated campus massacres still denies students and faculty the right to save their own lives.

How many more disarmed victims must die, Mr. President, before you will act?

Or is it even remotely possible you have acted to allow base commanders to arm soldiers on base but are so ashamed of doing the right thing that you ordered the new policy classified?

#

Catch A Tiger By Its Toe

Oh no you didn’t!

Neil, I can’t believe you used that subtitle. Don’t you remember what the original was?

Yeah, but I didn’t use the original. And the version I learned as a kid growing up in the Northeast — the one I did use — is just too perfect for what I’m about to write. So fears of political-incorrectness dealt with, let’s move on.

Why is Tiger Woods in trouble? For what reason is the private life of this sports legend subject to endless vivisection by the sewer media?

Let’s break this down.

Tiger Woods had a moving violation which cost him $164 and four points on his Florida drivers’ license. He can ditch the four points by spending another $9.95 and attending an online traffic school approved by all Florida counties. No, I’m not being compensated for the link. Tiger Woods is a billionaire. I don’t think the $173.95 matters to him.

And — let’s add this up — Tiger Woods is (a) a sports legend; (b) world famous; (c) incredibly rich; and (d) a good-looking guy in great physical shape. If there is any man alive who can spend the rest of his life fucking every beautiful woman who crosses his path, this is the guy. He actually has the possibility of leaving Hugh Hefner in his dust.

He was also smart enough to have a prenup with his wife that protects his fortune.

So — as Robin Williams asks repeatedly about subject after subject in his latest HBO special, Robin Williams: Weapons of Self Destruction, what the fuck?

It’s not like Tiger Woods needs to worry that his reputation will be so damaged by marital infidelity that any loss of commercial endorsements will lose him his mansions and send him to live in the projects. If he never made another dime he’s set for life. He could bugger Jack Nicklaus and the loss of endorsements wouldn’t affect his lifestyle.

So why doesn’t Tiger Woods bare his claws, growl, and simply go on Letterman and say, “I like having sex with a lot of women. It’s great. You know what I mean, Dave. If my wife doesn’t like it she doesn’t have to be Mrs. Tiger Woods. And the rest of you out there are just insanely jealous.”

Once — just once — couldn’t our society tolerate an ounce of self-honesty?

If you defended your right to live your life according to your own standards, Tiger Woods, then you’d really be my hero.


My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share
Print