Posted on 10/10/2003 12:54:25 PM PDT by kimmie7
In the news this week are several reports of an exchange between syndicated talk-show host Mike Gallagher and actor-turned-leftist-poster-child Edward Asner.
The account goes like this: Mike Gallagher approached Asner at a recent cocktail party promoting the new film "Elf" in which Asner stars as Santa Claus. As Gallagher introduced himself, Asner asked his profession. When Gallagher replied "radio talk-show host," Asner replied, "I love going toe-to-toe with you guys.''
''I know,'' Gallagher replied. ''I've heard you on Sean Hannity's show.''
''Hannity's next, you know,'' Asner responded.
''Huh?'' said Gallagher.
''Hannity's next,'' said Asner. ''We're going after him just like we went after Limbaugh. And you saw what happened to Rush this week, right?''
I can attest to these news reports because I was there. Standing not more than 10 feet from where the conversation was happening. Shortly afterward, as Mike and I were exiting the party, we were chatting on the elevator of the Empire State building.
"Kevin, did you hear what he said?" Mike exclaimed, "That was a truly strange experience." And he then proceeded to relate the story to the rest of the folks riding with us in the elevator.
The following day, as a part of the same film junket, I found myself sitting in a room with Mike and several others waiting for Mr. Asner to field his questions from us regarding the release of "Elf" – a movie that I believe will be huge at the box office this holiday season.
As Mr. Asner walked in, he saw both Mike and me sitting at the end of the table closest to him and quickly quipped, "What is this? The Salem witch trials?" This, of course, being a play on words alluding to Mike being a syndicated talk-show host for Salem Radio Network (and heard on better than 200 stations), and that I had just taken over as the host on the legendary New York's WMCA 570 "Home of the Good Guys," also a Salem property.
Upon seating himself at the end of the table and making small talk about cookies and cupcakes – he did seem to be in a particularly jovial mood – he asked point blank: "Does anyone at this table hate me? Hate my work as an activist or in any other way?"
It was such an odd question that the room fell dead silent for a moment before breaking into the short amount of time he had for questions about the film.
As he answered questions about the film, he often broke into stories about his days gone by, and even his reasons for getting involved in left-wing politics. He even talked somewhat reflectively about one of his first acting gigs, playing Santa for the downtown Chicago Marshall Field's store.
"It was the worst job I ever had," said Asner. "All I could do was put these poor – extremely poor – kids on my lap and say to them, 'Well Johnny, well Susie, Santa's gonna see what he can do about getting that for you. Knowing full well that these kids' parents were so poor that more than half these kids had no chance of ever seeing the gifts they asked for. It was just awful.'"
By the end of his time with us, I had not asked him a specific question yet, and in my mind I could not get away from the scene from the party of the night previous.
"Mr. Asner, I do have a question – unrelated to the film," I said. "In your long and distinguished acting career, going back to your earliest days in Chicago all the way up to present days working with Will Farrell on 'Elf', you have had the chance to do almost anything you could ever wish to do. But if you had the chance to play the biographical story of a historical figure you respected most over your lifetime, who would it be?"
Remembering the sad story he had told about the poor kids in Chicago, I half expected him to come out with a political name of some sort.
"I think Joe Stalin was a guy that was hugely misunderstood," said Asner. "And to this day, I don't think I have ever seen an adequate job done of telling the story of Joe Stalin, so I guess my answer would have to be Joe Stalin."
Suddenly the time had run out, and for the third time in less than 18 hours, Ed Asner had puzzled the room he was in, into a stunned and disbelieving silence.
Mr. Hannity ... I don't think you have anything to worry about.
And hasn't this been the Liberal line for over 70 years?
This approach is going to backfire on them. Rush is not going to "fall" because of this. He is dealing with a difficult situation and because of legal considerations hasn't been totally forthcoming. Once that, and his addiction has been cleared, he will be more popular than ever.
The Pope is visiting DC and President Bush takes him out for an afternoon on the Potomac...sailing on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia.They're admiring the sights when, all of a sudden, the Pope's hat blows off his head and out into the water. Secret service guys start to launch a boat, but Bush waves them off, saying, "Wait, wait. I'll take care of this. Don't worry."
Bush then steps off the yacht onto the surface of the water and walks out to the Holy Father's little hat, bends over and picks it up, then walks back to the yacht and climbs aboard. He hands the hat to the Pope amid stunned silence.
The next morning the topic of conversation among Democrats on the Hill, the New York Times, Hollywood celebrities, and in France and Germany is:
"Bush Can't Swim"
LSP pukes are SO predictable!
And hollower than most.
Not exactly correct. If you listened to his monologue you heard him say that he DID try to kick the habit, unsuccessfully, because he didn't spend enough time in the rehab program. This time he is going for the full monte.These 12 step based programs last about 4 weeks and are extremely intense. In addition, you are, just like an alcoholic, never completely free of the drug dependency and must remind yourself every day that you are an addict and can't go near the stuff. The failure rate is very very high. I wish him every success and I would hope that you would too. If you had the problem you would know what I mean.
Don the protective, flame retardant cape Leroy, you're fixing to have a heat wave.
By Arno Lustiger
Foreword by Yefim Etkind. Translated from the German. Enigma Books
REVIEWED BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN
Joseph Stalin had a favorite saying by which he lived and multitudes died. It went like this: "est chelovek, est problema, net cheloveka — net problemy." Or, "a person, a problem; no person — no problem." Millions of people in the Soviet Union became un-persons during his quarter-century rule. While the Georgian-born Stalin didn't particularly favor one nationality over another during his reign of terror, he was a "breaker of nations," as in Robert Conquest's book title — and he had a particular hatred for Soviet Jews.
Stalin's own daughter, Svetlana, attested to that psychosis: "His anti-Semitism surely originated from the long years of struggle with Trotsky and his supporters,. What was originally political hate gradually became a feeling of racial hatred against all Jews, without exception."
The Lustiger book is one of several recently published about Stalin's war against the Soviet Jews, but this is one which has Soviet documents I have not seen before. I only wish that the publisher and his readers had paid more attention to the translation, which is poor, and to the text itself which has some real howlers. (There never was a New York senator named Abraham Kaplan, the Crimea is nowhere near the Baltic Sea, Svetlana was forced by her father to marry not Andre Zhdanov, Stalin's hatchet-man, but his son, Iurii. And there are sentences which are incoherent, such as: "A few days after the revolt [in Spain], Franco agreed with the Politburo...."). Were it not for such editorial ineptitude (the misspelling of proper names alone would be troubling enough), one would not hesitate to to accept such interesting revelations as that Grigori Khaifets "was the first [Soviet] agent to report to Moscow about frantic American efforts regarding the atom bomb in an encoded telegram in 1941."
Born in Poland, the 79-year-old Lustiger is a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He now lives in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. A distant relative of Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the author has devoted his research and writing efforts to the story of the Russian Jews, from the days of the tsars to the Stalin era, particularly the last three months before Stalin's death March 5, 1953, to the post-Stalin years of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev through the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The Bolshevik revolution began, as Mr. Lustiger tells it, with a campaign against anti-Semitism and promotion of the Yiddish language and literature. At one point, there were 400 Yiddish periodicals. By 1938, there were none. The Communists liquidated Jewish institutions, publishing houses, cultural associations and arrested their employees.
It was providential that the 73-year-old Stalin suffered a stroke on Feb. 28, 1953 on the same day as the Jewish holiday of Purim. It was also on the same day that deportations to Siberia of more than one million Jews from Moscow alone and millions more from other parts of the Soviet Union were to begin.
There is some evidence that Stalin was also preparing new Moscow trials of those who had, during his genocidal reign, been his closest colleagues, like Vyacheslav Molotov whom Stalin forced to separate from his Jewish wife. (Molotov's wife was suspect because she had been heard speaking Yiddish with the then-Israeli ambassador, Golda Meir.)
Part of Stalin's anti-Semitism was to conjure up the so-called Doctor's Plot, in which the Kremlin doctors, most of them Jews, "confessed" under torture that they had deliberately misdiagnosed health problems of Soviet leaders. These accusations produced, says Mr. Lustiger, a "mass hysteria," so that Russians refused to accept medications by Jewish physicians. All these doctors were freed a few days after Stalin's death. The core of Mr. Lustiger's volume is the tragedy that befell the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC).
Organized in March 1942 in Moscow with Stalin's full approval, the JAFC was assigned the job of fund-raising in the United States for the Soviet war effort. Solomon Mikhoels, the charismatic director of the Moscow Yiddish Art Theatre, and Itzik Feffer, a Yiddish poet but also a secret police informer, were sent to the United States in May 1943 on a six-month tour. It was highly successful. Forgotten was the Nazi-Soviet alliance from August 1939 to June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. During that 20-month entente cordiale, writes Mr. Lustiger, the Soviet media substituted the phrase "reactionary racism" for the word "fascism" which could no longer be mentioned let alone be criticized. It was ten days after the German invasion, July 2, 1941, before Stalin permitted public criticism of Germany. And equally forgotten was Stalin's purge of the Red Army during which 40,000 officers were executed, among them 169 Jewish generals.
As for the JAFC, on Nov. 20, 1948, it was officially dissolved. By Jan. 28, 1949, some 100 committee members were in jail as "rootless cosmopolitans," a euphemism Stalin adopted, says Mr. Lustiger, "so as not to put the party's reputation with the international left at risk." And yet at the same time Stalin was supporting Israel in the United Nations including official recognition of the Zionist state. A few months later Stalin was inveighing against "Zionism" as an outpost of American imperialism and the JAFC members became part of a Zionist-U.S. conspiracy against the Soviet Union.
Stalin's first JAFC victim was Solomon Mikhoels whom he ordered shot and then run over by a truck to make it appear he died in an accident. Svetlana is authority for this revelation since she says she heard her father in January 1948 telephone the order to liquidate the actor. There followed a great State funeral and a lavish obituary in Pravda mourning the great loss. His next victims were some 110 JAFC members, all accused of espionage, nationalist propaganda, and of seeking to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea as a "bridgehead" for American imperialism. The trial of the top 15 JAFC members began May 8, 1952. And it is here that the book comes into its own with the trial transcript of the JAFC leadership, which fought back. It didn't help. Thirteen of the 15 were executed by firing squad Aug. 12, 1952. (Confusion here: The post-Soviet rehabilitation document in 1989 cited in the book refers to 10 JAFC members condemned to death). Despite its many imperfections Mr. Lustiger's book is encyclopedic and remains an important work in the history of the Soviet Union.
So Asner thinks ol' Joe Stalin was "misunderstood"? Mr. Ed would probably not have survived had he been one of Stalin's early supporters.
When he was credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaderick, his answer to the question was, "Talk to my lawyer."
That question still goes unanswered.
A weird example of fessin' up.
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