Frontpage Interviews guest today is Burt Prelutsky, a weekly columnist for WorldNetDaily.com. He has been a humor columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a movie critic for Los Angeles Magazine. As a freelancer, he has written for the New York Times, TV Guide, Modern Maturity, Emmy, Holiday, American Film, and Sports Illustrated. He has also written for several television series, including Dragnet, McMillan and Wife, M*A*S*H, Dr. Quinn, and Diagnosis Murder.
His most recent book Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco is available from WorldNetDaily's online store.
FP: Burt Prelutsky, thank you for joining us at Frontpage Interview.
Prelutsky: It's a pleasure and a privilege.
FP: So what inspired you to put these collection of essays together?
Prelutsky: Actually, I was approached by Joseph Farah at WND.com, one of the sites that posts my essays. I had self-published a collection a few years back, but it was the hardest thing I ever did and I swore I'd never do it again. Fortunately, Cumberland House was amenable to doing the heavy lifting this time around.)
FP: Tell us about your days on the Left. What attracted you to the Left and why did you stay there as long as you did?
Prelutsky: I was first generation American. Both my parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. In a home such as ours, being a Democrat was as natural as having boiled chicken on Friday night. My parents and relatives thought that FDR walked--or, rather, rolled on water. Then when he died and his successor, Harry Truman, recognized the state of Israel, the die was cast. So I grew up voting for Democrats every four years, but waking up the next day and hating myself. I mean, I actually voted for people like Mondale, Carter and Dukakis. Mea culpa. Old habits, especially those bred in the bone, are hard to break.
FP: Expand a little for us on why being Russian Jewish immigrants meant that being Democrats was as natural as having boiled chicken on Friday night. Why do you think many Jews in general are attracted to the Democratic Party and to liberalism? In todays context it clearly doesnt make any sense, since it is the Republican Party and the Right that truly supports Israeli security, no?
Prelutsky: Traditionally, Jews are leftists. The only question is how far left; some are Communists, some are Socialists or Progressives, while most have found a home in the far left wing of the Democratic Party. Israel is not a high priority for a great many Jews, who are secular in their values, and whose religious identity takes the form of voting the straight left-wing ticket. A lot of Jews are quite content to ignore the fact that Israel is a western democracy, an ally of America, and surrounded by the vilest people on the face of the earth. Instead, many American Jews side with those who advocate suicide bombings of school buses and pizza parlors, who treat their women as chattel, who would never even consider the separation of state and religion, who oppose democracy, and who devalue education, free speech, and a sense of humor.
FP: Can you share with us some of the events that occurred that made you question your presence within the Left and what ultimately motivated you to leave it?
Prelutsky: I came to realize that, in spite of all the jokes about his napping during cabinet meetings, Ronald Reagan, who inherited 20% inflation and a 10% unemployment rate from Carter, and not only turned the economy around, but was influential in bringing the Cold War to a successful conclusion, accomplished more while he was sleeping than the Democrats did when they were wide awake. Or whatever passes for their being wide awake.
A secondary matter took place in the boardroom of the Writers Guild. I had been a member of the Board for four years when the lawyers for Robert Mapplethorpe came to us requesting $5,000 for his defense fund. It seems he and a gallery owner had been arrested on charges of pornography charges. Mapplethorpe, for those too young to remember, was a photographer whose artistic vision required that eight and nine year old children be stripped down for his camera. Because he then put frames around his sleazy product, we were supposed to accept that he was an artiste. In the boardroom that night, I not only argued against providing the money, I also voiced objection to the NEA, which had long subsidized his career.
The pornographic nature of his work aside, I said that in a country with 260 million people, anyone who couldn't earn a living with his art didn't deserve to live on the largesse of the American taxpayer; what he required wasn't a federal hand-out, it was vocational guidance. It wasn't simply that I was out-voted 18-1 that evening, but that it was so apparent that my fellow board members had simply tuned me out. It was obviously enough, so far as they were concerned, that I was aligning myself with Sen. Jesse Helms to make me wrong and even possibly insane. It hit me that liberals are so snug in their cocoon of self-righteousness that, once they've determined which is the left side of any issue, they are impervious to even hearing the other side.
FP: So tell us a bit about your intellectual journey after you left the Left. Did you lose your community as so many former leftists have? Were you banished by many friends?
Prelutsky: I did have a falling out with some of my former acquaintances. In a way, though, I could sympathize with them. After all, they must have felt blind-sided. So far as they knew, I was a liberal, the same as them, and suddenly, as if in a sci-fi movie, I had joined the pod people on the Right. With some friends, we went on pretty much as before, while shying away from political matters in our conversations. It is not easy, I have found, to disagree agreeably, especially if you think the future of western civilization is at very real risk.
FP: Why do you think the radical Left has reached out in solidarity to our Islamist enemy today?
Prelutsky: I think that those on the Left feel special about themselves when they find themselves standing up for those they regard as the underdog. The underdog can be criminals in America or the Muslims in the Middle East. Be it Tookie Williams, a Palestinian suicide bomber, or a convicted pedophile, by aligning themselves with those that most normal Americans despise, they get to regard themselves as existing on a higher moral plain. They pledge allegiance to George Soros and they send money to the ACLU. Which would be bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that so many of these unrepentant numbskulls of the 60s have wound up in the media, academe, and on the bench, and thus have power and influence far out of sync with their actual numbers. What's more, they are the parents, grandparents and professors, God help us, of the current generation.
FP: So what do you make of the War on Terror in general and the war in Iraq in particular?
Prelutsky: I think both wars must be waged more fiercely. We are at war with those who call us the Great Satan, an attempt at creating a smokescreen behind which the true Islamic Satanists can hide. Pat Buchanan, in his infinite wisdom, says we should do nothing about Iran because, according to him, they won't have nuclear capability for ten more years. On what he bases this belief, he doesn't say. But if even he believes it is an inevitability, wouldn't it make more sense to do something about it before 2016 rolls around?
As for Iraq, I said even before the invasion, which was based on intelligence which politicians on the right and the left all believed, it didn't much matter to me if Saddam Hussein did or didn't have weapons of mass destruction. What we knew was that he had had them and he had used them. Playing hide-the-soap with the U.N. investigators was all a big flim-flam. If he didn't have the weapons, so much the better; it meant he couldn't use them against coalition troops. So far as I was concerned, Hussein had murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people, he had invaded his neighbors in a move to control the world's oil supply, he had lobbed missiles into Israel, and he had ignored the conditions of the 1991 armistice; I saw no good reason to allow him to stay in place, manipulating the corrupt U.N. through his sweetheart oil deals with France, Russia, and Germany.
What I always say to those opposed to our invading Iraq is that they should cast their minds back to the 1930s and that they regard Hussein as der fuhrer. In '36, Hitler did not seem like a major threat to the world. Now let us, for the sake of argument, create a scenario in which Hitler did not annex Czechoslovakia or the Sudetenland and did not go on to invade Poland. Would these same people say that so long as Hitler only killed and tortured German Jews, gypsies, Socialists, Catholics, cripples, the retarded, and those opposed to Nazism, the world should not have interceded?
FP: In terms of the Muslims rage against the Pope and the cartoonists etc., why do you think the Left doesnt stand up in defense of free speech, which is supposedly its big value? And what do you think of the Muslim reaction to the Pope?
Prelutsky: The Left is as anti-American as the jihadists. More specifically, liberals hate Bush, Christians, and Conservatives. If only liberals had the vote, in an election between Bush and Castro or Bush and Chavez, the Communist dictators would win.
The Muslim reaction to the Pope's words was utterly predictable. The jihadists will go berserk over anything, and those on the Left will support their lunacy, up to and including the vandalizing of churches and the killing of a nun. Those on the Left are anti-religion except if it happens to be Islam. They say they are for free speech, for the separation of church and state, for free elections, for women's rights, for democracy, etc., etc., but they see no contradiction in their support of the PLO and other terrorist organizations that are attempting to annihilate Israel. Liberals, such as Stephen Spielberg, love to deal in moral equivalency, insisting, for instance, that there was no real difference between the Arabs massacring the Olympic athletes at Munich, and Israel's tracking down and executing the killers.
The problem with the Left in America isn't merely that they are wrong on every major issue, but that, in spite of the fact that very few of us identify ourselves as liberals, they have influence far out of proportion to their actual numbers. This is because, like a cancer, they've infected the courts, journalism, and the Groves of Academe. They're a cancer with a political agenda.
FP: Is the strength of the Left growing and dwindling? As a former leftist, what is your advice on the best way to fight the Lefts influence?
Prelutsky: I take it you mean growing or dwindling. But I suppose it could grow in one area and dwindle in another. I think the Left is losing numbers (at least based on the election results of the recent past), but I don't think it is losing influence...for the reasons I gave in my previous response.
I think the best way to fight them is to beat them in every election possible. (I suppose shooting them down like mad dogs is out of the question. Pity.) Eventually, one assumes, if liberals continue to lose elections, their pet judges will stop being appointed to the Supreme Court. As liberal newspapers, such as the L.A. Times, continue to lose subscribers and advertising, and as more and more people stop depending on the liberal rags and network news for information and opinion, the Left will inevitably see its influence drain away.
It does continue to astonish and disturb me that, in spite of having the shrill and idiotic likes of Kennedy, Dean, Gore, Kerry, Clinton, Pelosi, Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Charles Schumer, Barbara Boxer, Robert Byrd, James Carville, George Soros, etc., etc., beating the drums for the Left that the Democratic party hasn't yet gone the way of the Whigs and the dodo bird.
FP: Burt Prelutsky, thank you for joining us.
Prelutsky: As my old friend Groucho Marx was wont to say, I didn't know you were coming apart. But, seriously, thank you for giving me this opportunity to reach all the really smart people who get their daily minimum dose of the truth at Frontpagemag.com. |
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