Tag: Howard Stern

Bill Walton: Dumb as Dennis Rodman?

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Bill Walton, who’s very good at throwing a ball in a hoop

Yesterday we reported on NBA star turned sports broadcaster Bill Walton, who while covering a recent game in China sang the praises not only of the country and the people but of its political system. Enthusiastically, he contrasted American materialism with the lack thereof that (he claimed) is an attribute of the Chinese people. As we noted, Walton went on for quite a while in this vein without ever acknowledging that the country he was eulogizing is a Communist dictatorship where the news media, property rights, Internet access, and much else are severely restricted by the state.

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Liu Xiaobo

And that’s just the beginning of a long list of distasteful facts about China that Walton avoided mentioning. One of them is that the country imprisons its human-rights activists. One of them, Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, has been behind bars for eleven years, while his wife is under house arrest for no other crime, apparently, than being married to him. China leads the world, moreover, in executions, the number of which has declined during the past decade from about 10,000 a year to a shade under 4,000 today. A giant image of Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in human history, still dominates Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. 

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Mao overlooking Tiananmen Square

When SBNation, a major sports news site, posted an article about Walton’s praise for China, complete with video clips, a couple of readers had pertinent comments to make. “I like Bill,” wrote one of them, “but this guy must have been paid by the tourist bureau of China! I mean, he talks about China as though it is an up and coming paradise. It’s a trash heap! 900 million poverty-stricken and governed by a corrupt autocratic regime. What a joke.” After this and another reader comment critical of Walton were posted, the comments were closed for that page.

On December 1, Sirius XM radio host Howard Stern spent several minutes playing excerpts of Walton’s acclaim for China and offering his own commentary (from which we’ve silently omitted a few, but not all, obscenities).

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Howard Stern

“I’ve talked to actual people in a nail salon who used to live in China,” said Stern. “And they’d rather work in a nail salon [in New York] for absolutely zero money” than in China. “China’s like the worst place you could be a worker!” Stern went on. “Because it’s Communism, and unless you’re in the government, in the hierarchy, you get shit on. That’s how come they’ve got a strong economy – because they shit on their people….So anyway, Bill Walton goes over…and Bill Walton obviously is being shown the best parts of China….He’s carrying on about how great China is. Well, of course it’s great for you! They’re working you, dude! They’re not showing you the sweatshops!” Excellently, if a tad crudely, put.

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Basketball diplomat Dennis Rodman

Stern compared Walton to Tokyo Rose, who notoriously broadcast Japanese propaganda to Allied troops during World War II. Stern’s sidekick, Robin Quivers, had another comparison. “It just sort of reminds me,” she said, “of the other basketball diplomat, Dennis Rodman.”

Indeed. The notorious Rodman, with his staggering and (it seems) stubbornly willful ignorance about the North Korean regime, may seem uniquely stupid – the useful idiot par excellence. But Walton, on the evidence of his fatuous, painfully embarrassing panegyrics about China, sure isn’t far behind.

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Tall tales about China

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Bill Walton in broadcast mode

Back in the 1970s, seven-footer Bill Walton was a basketball superstar, following a stellar turn for the UCLA Bruins with a pro career playing center for the Portland Trail Blazers, San Diego Clippers, and Boston Celtics. In 1978, he was named the NBA’s most valuable player. After retiring from the game in 1990, he became a sports broadcaster. In November, it turned out that he’s also a big fan of Communist China.

The revelation came during the Pac-12 China Game in China between Texas and Washington. Walton was on the scene, hired to do color commentary for ESPN. As it happened, however, much of his commentary was not about the game itself but about the country in which it was taking place.

He described his visit to China as a “transformational, life-changing experience for me. I cannot express the phenomenal things that are going on in this country.” He called China “remarkable” and noted that its “civilization has spanned more than 8000 years.”

Walton was awed by the scale of things in China. “There are 170 cities in the country of China with a minimum of a million people in them,” he said. “There are 300 million people in the middle class here with 800 more million trying to climb up.” In Shanghai alone, he noted, there are as many people as in all of Texas. The University of Texas has 51,000 students, but “there are that many people in every one of these countless skyscrapers here!”

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The China we don’t see

He favorably contrasted the Chinese people’s attitude toward consumerism with Americans’. Yes, there’s some consumerism there, but mostly “government investment in infrastructure. There is so much room for growth.” In the U.S., “70% of our economy is consumer goods, purchasing stuff,” he said, his contempt for American materialism palpable. The comparable figure for China? “Only 40%.” He added: “You know what the savings rate in the United States is? Zero. Or negative. You know what the savings rate is here in China? 50%.”

U165P5029T2D579136F31DT20130407105749He mentioned one aspect of Chinese society that he particularly liked: “They don’t have credit cards because the government doesn’t want them having [them].”

Does Walton have credit cards? Would he really want to live in a country that wouldn’t allow that? Or is his view, like that of so many Western fans of Communism, that these restrictions are just plain terrific for other people but (of course) not for him?

At no point, in any case – at least as far as we’ve been able to determine – did Walton mention (let alone criticize) the fact that the nation he was showering with praise is a Communist state, a dictatorship, a place where political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and property rights are severely limited. The press is censored, as is the Internet. Detention without trial is a common practice; so are forced confessions. It was only a few weeks ago that China announced the end to its one-child policy, a rigidly enforced regulation that led to widespread infanticide and countless forced abortions.

More tomorrow. 

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“Stalin wasn’t even a Communist”

trumboWe’ve spent the last couple of days talking about Trumbo, a new movie by director Jay Roach that tries to make a free-speech hero out of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-76), and about Hollywood Traitors, a new book in which Allan H. Ryskind shows that Trumbo and his fellow Tinseltown Stalinists, far from being free-speech heroes, sought, in the years before the HUAC hearings, to silence non-Communists and to slip as much pro-Soviet propaganda as possible into their scripts. 

Front-The2And in the years after the blacklist? As the late Andrew Breitbart noted in a 2009 interview, Hollywood has been run by leftists for “the last forty years,” and those leftists have made one movie after another about the blacklist – among them The Front (1976), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), and The Majestic (2001). All of these pictures have sold the same dishonest message – namely, to quote Breitbart, that “the worst thing that ever happened” during the Cold War was that “a few screenwriters had to write under pseudonyms for a few years.” Yet for the last four decades, Breitbart added, these very same powers-that-be “have been vicious to people who disagree with them,” doing their best to keep the silver screen scrubbed clean of non-leftist voices. Indeed. And if that’s not a blacklist a – or, at least, a “brownlist” – what is it?

2001_MAJESTICBut the main point to be made about Trumbo is this: however inadvisable, stupid, wrong, or unjust the HUAC hearings and the blacklist may or may not have been, Trumbo’s summons by HUAC and his placement on the Hollywood blacklist didn’t magically convert him into a champion of American freedom. Roach and company, of course, would have you believe otherwise. On November 3, promoting the movie on the Howard Stern Show, Bryan Cranston, who plays Trumbo, actually made two thoroughly outrageous claims in quick succession.

First, Cranston maintained that “Stalin wasn’t even a Communist. He was a fascist dictator.” Cranston didn’t explain what he meant by this ridiculous statement, and Stern didn’t ask. Presumably, this was Cranston’s own little contribution to the decades-old, and still ongoing, effort by many leftists to whitewash Communism as an ideology by representing real-life, brutal, monstrous, totalitarian Communism, whether in the USSR or China or Vietnam or Cuba, as a betrayal of true Communism – which they continue to view as benign ideology that’s never really been put into practice and that, if it were tried, would succeed, lifting humankind to an unprecedented level of goodness and glory.  

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Bryan Cranston

Second, Cranston suggested that even though Trumbo and other members of the Hollywood Ten joined the Communist Party, they weren’t really Communists or Stalinists or whatever; they were just well-meaning guys in search of a way to fix the ailing U.S. economy. And besides, the USSR was our wartime ally. 

We’ll wind this up tomorrow.

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Roger Waters v. Bon Jovi

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Roger Waters

We’ve spent a few days pondering the pronouncements of Roger Waters, formerly a member of the band Pink Floyd and currently a self-righteous preacher against Israel and against entertainers who dare to perform there. In the last couple of years he’s written articles attacking Robbie Williams and Dianne Warwick. Most recently, in early October, Salon ran an open letter from Waters to the three members of the band Bon Jovi, Jon Bon Jovi, David Bryan, and Tico Torres. The earlier pieces were aggressive enough; but this time around he really took off the gloves, telling Bon Jovi that by performing in Israel they were standing “shoulder to shoulder”

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Jon Bon Jovi

With the settler who burned the baby

With the bulldozer driver who crushed Rachel Corrie

With the soldier who shot the soccer player’s feet to bits

With the sailor who shelled the boys on the beach

With the sniper who killed the kid in the green shirt…

And so on. His last line: “To stand by silent and indifferent is the greatest crime of all.”

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Doron Goldberg

Perhaps because of its combative and graphic nature, Waters’s open letter to Bon Jovi drew even more attention than his previous Salon efforts. One response, from Israeli blogger Doron Goldberg, gave Waters a dose of his own medicine, accusing him of standing “shoulder to shoulder”

With the “passover massacre” suicide bomber who killed 30 and injured 172.

With the sniper who killed the 10 month old Shalhevet Pass.

With the suicide bomber who killed 17 in a disco….

Jon Bon Jovi, in any event, wasn’t moved by Waters’s attack. “It doesn’t interest me,” he said. “I told my managers to give one simple answer: That I’m coming to Israel and I’m excited to come.”

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Bon Jovi in Tel Aviv

As it happened, Bon Jovi’s performance for an audience of 50,000 fans in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park took place only minutes after two people were killed in a Jerusalem terrorist attack. At the concert, Jon Bon Jovi introduced the song “We Don’t Run” (“We don’t run, I’m standing my ground, / We don’t run, And we don’t back down”) by saying it “should be the fight song for Tel Aviv.”

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Howard Stern

The New York Post congratulated the band: “So here’s to Jon Bon Jovi, David Bryan on the ivories and drummer Tico Torres: They don’t run — or back down.” Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, called Waters a “front man for genocidal terrorists.” Sirius satellite radio host Howard Stern tore into Waters at length on his October 6 broadcast, wondering aloud why, if Waters — a (former) friendly acquaintance and occasional guest on his program — considers Israel stolen land, does he “live in America, a country that was founded on white people coming in and obliterating the native population? How does he stand it?” The next day, Stern picked up the subject again, noting that he’d heard privately from “many prominent people” who’d agreed strongly with his remarks — but who didn’t want to say so publicly, so scared were they of attracting the wrath of the BDS crowd. 

“Don’t be afraid to speak your mind,” Stern urged his timid allies. “Don’t let them get away with this!”

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