On Sunday night HBO premiered its new series "The Newsroom," in which its menopausal liberal creator Aaron Sorkin slants his view of TV journalism as he did in "The West Wing," which depicted a Democratic presidency as so wonderful that critics nicknamed it "The Left Wing."
Sorkin's new drama claims it is "speaking truth to stupid," with stupid portrayed as conservatives and Republicans.
The show's star character is a network anchor who metamorphoses from a Republican-in-name-only worm into a liberal butterfly who spews Obamacrat views.
"I'm too old to be changed by fear of dumb people," says this shiny butterfly with two left wings.
This is one of Sorkin's favorite strawman stereotypes: the "good" Republican with the courage and smarts to repudiate troglodyte right-wing individualism, capitalism, small governmentism and American exceptionalism. Liberal Alan Alda played this literal RINO Republican in "The West Wing."
Appropriately, the actor playing this straw man in "The Newsroom" is Jeff Daniels, best known as the typecast co-star, with Jim Carrey, of the 1994 comedy "Dumb and Dumber."
Sorkin opens with fireworks as Daniels unleashes a tirade, telling an audience that "America is NOT the greatest country in the world . . . any more."
In this rant Sorkin scripts a machine gun blast of America's shortcomings — how we are "not the greatest country in the world" in a host of things, from literacy to life expectancy.
This smug liberal ignorance and illogic compares a diverse United States that is home to immigrants from throughout the world — including millions of uneducated poor people recently arrived from Latin America — to nations such as Norway and Sweden that are monocultures with little diversity, variety, or immigrant population.
We have learned to expect such brain-dead leftist demagoguery from HBO, whose closest thing to a genuine "news" show is the lefty partisan rigged forum of Bill Maher.
Maher each week bashes conservatives, Republicans, and — from his atheist perspective — Christians. His preferred method is not intelligent analysis but a smattering of half-baked factoids and liberal dogma, and a ton of name-calling and mockery, a tactic straight out of the radical cookbook of Saul Alinsky.
Maher's unbalanced, cowardly comic smears on HBO have made this smarmy, sexist host rich enough to donate $1 million to President Barack Obama's re-election effort.
Sorkin may have agreed to this HBO show as his own weekly propaganda donation to President Obama to influence the November election.
But on HBO Sorkin is preaching to the choir. The typical viewer of HBO's politically leftist and culturally sex-crammed productions is already a liberal Democrat.
Even HBO's spring movie production "Hemingway & Gellhorn" lionized journalist Martha Gellhorn while neglecting to mention that in real life she was a radical left-wing journalist who relentlessly attacked anti-communists but refused ever to criticize the Soviet Union.
To make sure nobody misses the leftward slant of Sorkin's series, the star who plays the top boss of its fictional TV network is Jane Fonda. Would Hanoi Jane have joined this cast if the show did not advance her own ideology?
"I can't imagine that the people who intend to watch 'The Newsroom' really need basic liberal talking points parroted back at them as if they were startling new insights," writes The Atlantic's reviewer Richard Lawson.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Aaron Sorkin's new show is that liberal critics have greeted it with less than wild enthusiasm.
Lawson wonders if "The Newsroom" is Sorkin's "real fantasy, making a Republican come to say and believe all the things that a Democrat would." The series opener, he writes, is "self-congratulatory . . . cliched speechifying."
The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum writes that "The Newsroom" scores points only "if you share its politics," which she describes as "artificial intelligence," and "full of yelling and self-righteousness . . . like a sanctimonious 'Zelig.'"
As in "The West Wing," writes Nussbaum, Sorkin's Newsroom "deck stays stacked" to make liberals look brilliant and conservatives stupid to such an unbalanced degree that she found herself rooting for "all those flyover morons."
Even New York Times pundit David Carr sees Sorkin "tilting piously left in his choice of targets," although Carr suggests that CNN should remodel its (already very liberal, and failing) news programs on Sorkin's retro ideal of a liberal-ruled media.
Lowell Ponte is co-author, with Craig R. Smith, of "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"; "The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us . . . And Seven Ways to Stop It"; and "Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America's Optimistic Golden Age." For a limited time, you can get a free postpaid copy of "The Inflation Deception" by calling 800-630-1494. Read more reports from Lowell Ponte — Click Here Now.
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