Quote of the Day – David Mamet, Brilliant

“If you stop licensing taxi cabs, tomorrow you will see guys and women on every street corner saying, ‘Who wants to go to XYZ address?’ (The cabbie) will put five people in the car and drive them to that address. … When the guy drops them off, if he’s smart, he’ll say: ‘Tomorrow — same thing, right? What do you guys want to drink for breakfast?’ There will be cappuccino and ice tea and glass of milk. After X months, he will have three cars; after X months, he will have a fleet. And everyone will be competing to meet the needs of the commuters, which also is going to reduce traffic. Why are they allowed to compete? Because the government got the hell out of the business.”

Mamet on Fox and Friends

David Mamet from onlineseats.com

David Mamet will be on Fox and Friends this morning. If you’re awake and reading this, be sure and tune in. He has a compelling story and his book, as I’ve blogged before, is great!

 

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.