http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24647


Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco

Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco

Conservatives Are from Mars

Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24647


Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24647
Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco

By Jamie Glazov


FrontPageMagazine.com | September 28, 2006


Frontpage Interview's 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 today's context it clearly
doesn't 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 doesn't 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 Left's
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.