The former brain dead liberal speaks but to only a conservative audience

It’s interesting that if you look up David Mamet at Wikipedia, there is no mention of his new book The Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Culture. There’s no mention of his 2008 op-ed piece in the Village Voice where he ‘comes out’ as a former “brain dead liberal” and says:

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

It’s interesting and telling that the liberal Wikipedia, as well as other liberal outlets, is trying to ignore Mamet’s conservative epiphany. I hope that conservative media jump on this opportunity to showcase another David Horowitz or Andrew Breitbart conservative convert.

Mamet’s a practicing Jew who sees the world through different eyes now than he did 10 or even 5 years ago. He’s the Pulitzer Prize winning author of GlenGarry Glen Ross and his screenplays for movies such as The Untouchables, The Verdict and Wag the Dog have been nominated for Academy Awards.

He’s one of the few (now former) liberals who chose to look at other sides and read other ideas. His new heros are now conservative giants like Milton Freidman, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. In the process, his eyes have been opened.

I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he inevitably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.
The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt not themselves but others.*

*President Obama said, “The individual at some point must be able to say, ‘I have enough money.'” But will Mr. Obama out of office, say this to himself, and the vast riches he will enjoy? One must doubt it.

I started reading his new book yesterday. It’s only 223 pages long (minus his acknowledgments, bibliography and index) but every page, every paragraph is quotable. It’s an amazingly interesting, entertaining and educational book written in a playwright’s lyrical style.

I highly recommend it.

Evan Sayet: How Liberals Think. They really DO hate America. And he tells you how and why.

A born and raised liberal New York Jew, gives you less than an hour of how he learned liberals are wrong and and why their thinking is Anti-American. If you want to understand what moral relativism really means, he ezplains it very well.

This is excellent! If you have some time, please listen.

“After 9/11 I realized my fellow liberals really DID hate America” :

It’s their goal to “leave us nothing else to believe in” :

“Indoctrinated into a cult of indiscriminate-ness” and this is moral relativism by another name :

“If one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter, can we at least agree that they must be  fighting for FREEDOM?” :

And Evan takes questions :

More to the point – Has the Conservative moment arrived?

Has the liberal moment come and gone?

By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
09/30/09 7:16 AM EDT

A new Gallup poll shows a sharp increase in the number of people who say they want the government to promote “traditional values.”

Gallup’s question was simple: “Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?” In the new poll, taken in the first days of September, 53 percent of respondents say they want the government to promote traditional values, while 42 percent say they do not want the government to favor any particular set of values. Five percent do not have an opinion.

The results are a significant change from recent years. For most of the last two decades, a majority of people have been in favor of the government promoting traditional values. But that number began to decline in 2005, and the number of people who believe the government should not favor any particular set of values began to rise. Last September, when Gallup asked the same question, the public was split down the middle on the issue, 48 percent to 48 percent. Now, opinion has rather abruptly gone back to the old position, and there’s an 11-point gap between the two, in favor of traditional values.

By the way, the Gallup pollsters did not define “traditional values” when asking the question. “Thus, respondents answer in light of their understanding of the term,” Gallup writes. But Gallup adds that “the results by party and ideology…suggest that respondents understand traditional values to be those generally favored by the Republican party.”

The recent change in favor of traditional values has been most pronounced among independents, among whom Gallup says there has been a “dramatic turnaround.” Last year, independents were overwhelmingly in favor, by 55 percent to 37 percent, of the government not favoring any set of values. In the new survey, those numbers are almost reversed, with 54 percent saying the government should promote traditional values and 40 percent saying it should not. Gallup did not find similarly striking changes among Democrats and Republicans, although Democrats have also moved a little bit in the direction of wanting the government to promote traditional values.

But it is the turnaround among independents — Gallup also found similar numbers among people who called themselves moderates — that put a screeching halt to the shift that had been taking place in the last few years. “Americans’ views of the proper government role in promoting traditional values had moved in a more liberal direction since 2005, to the point that last year, as many said the government should not promote traditional values as said it should,” Gallup writes. “If that trend had continued, 2009 would have marked the first time Gallup found more Americans preferring that the government refrain from actively promoting traditional values. Instead, Americans’ attitudes reverted to a more conservative point of view on the matter. Now, Americans favor the government’s promoting traditional values by an 11-point margin, similar to the double-digit margins favoring that view through much of the prior two decades.”

There’s no way to know precisely what this means. But here’s one theory. In the last few years, public opinion on the role of government was driven by the intense unpopularity of George W. Bush and the Republican Party. Unhappy with Bush and the GOP, voters recoiled from the image of Republicans as the party of traditional values — even though they basically held to those traditional values in their own lives. Now, however, with a government completely controlled by Democrats, that is, by the anti-traditional values party — in last year’s poll, Democrats were 60-37 against the government promoting traditional values — the public has abruptly returned to its basic pro-traditional values position.

But that period of revulsion at Bush and Republicans from 2005 to 2008 left a legacy: a Democrat in the White House and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, at least until 2010. That is why you see Democrats racing to enact their agenda, even as they see the political conditions around them changing. They have the majorities, based on the public’s very temporary mood of 2005-2008, and they are determined to put their preferred policies in place no matter what the public thinks now.

The Gallup numbers also suggest that Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate have fundamentally misread their own victories. Did voters elect Democrats because they desperately wanted national health care? Sprawling and expensive environmental regulation? Federal deficits triple the size of just a few years ago? No. The voters elected Democrats because they were sick of Bush and Republicans. Now Bush and the GOP are gone and out of power. Democrats are doing what they thought the voters wanted. And it turns out the voters didn’t want that at all.