David Mamet, the author best known out here in the hinterland for “Wag the Dog,” wrote an article in the Village Voice titled: “Why I am no Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.'” Follow the link and read it.

It takes enormous courage for a member of the NY intellectual class to admit to being a non-liberal. I won’t use the “C” word. Thank you David for sharing with us your seeing-the-light story.

No matter what the Liberal pessimists says the USA is the best place in the world to live. If you don’t believe it look at the millions of people who are voting with their feet to get here. Haitians will brave 200 miles of open sea to try to get to Florida. They raft past Cuba which is only 40 miles away. Why because this is the land of opportunity.

A few quotes from Mamet’s article:

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

We in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.