When Showtime announced that it was releasing a miniseries about “the untold story of the greatest terrorist the world has never known,” it reminded me how 40 years ago this month, that man started to etch his name in blood in Beirut. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQkXeSnY_KU
At 21, Imad Mughniyeh (pronounced E-mod Moog-nee-yah) planned a suicide car bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1973, that left 63 people dead, including 17 Americans. Among the dead were seven CIA officers, including the head of the CIA’s Near East Division.
The son of a poor farmer from South Lebanon, Mughniyeh joined the Palestine Liberation Organization as a teenager and eventually became a member of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s security detail. As a Shiite Muslim and non-Palestinian, however, Mughniyeh eventually gravitated toward Lebanese politics and helped found Hezbollah, the powerful organization that basically runs Lebanon today.
An accomplished bombmaker, Mughniyeh worked with Syria, which provided logistical and operational support, and Iran, which funded his operations.
I spent several years of my journalistic career trying to track down Mughniyeh without success. But I did investigate many of his activities in the 1980s, which included the following:
–The truck bombings on October 23, 1983, against French paratroopers and the U.S Marines barracks in Beirut–attacks that killed 60 French soldiers and 241 Marines and sailors.
–The assassination of Malcolm Kerr, the president of American University, in Beirut in January 1984.
–The kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, including journalist Terry Anderson, British negotiator Terry Waite, and CIA station chief William Buckley, whom Mughniyeh executed.
–The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985 during which he executed a U.S. Navy diver and tossed his body on the tarmac of the Beirut airport.
–The 1992 bombings of the Israel embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 29, and of a Jewish cultural center there in July 1994, killing 85 people.
–The Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which left 19 U.S. Air Force personnel dead in 1996.
“Mughniyeh is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else,” former CIA agent Robert Baer wrote. “He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are loyal to him that he can fully trust. He doesn’t just recruit people.”
Milton Bearden, another CIA man, said: “Both [Osama] bin Laden and Mughniyeh were pathological killers. But there was always a nagging amateurishness about bin Laden—his wildly hyped background, his bogus and false claims. … Bin Laden cowered and hid, and Mughniyeh spent his life giving us the finger.”
In a reported joint operation by the CIA and Mossad, Mughniyeh was killed on February 12, 2008, by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria.
If you want to know why Joe Biden is off the media’s protection you have to understand the Donald Trump is pretty much like Espresso’s Pizza in Fitchburg. You either love it or hate it, there is pretty much no middle ground.
Thus in 2020 when Donald Trump got more votes than any president running for re-election than any other president in history you could find gatekeepers who would allow an election to be stolen from him because while you can’t make a plausible argument that Joe Biden campaigning from his garage to get more votes than any other candidate in history you could make a plausible argument that he was so toxic to some that he might generate even more votes against him for Joe Biden to get even more votes than Obama in the year of his big win.
Thus suit after suit was tossed on standing and technical grounds.
But after three years of Biden, of bank failures of the economy crashing, war, the dollar no longer being the worlds reserve currency and Americans being evacuated by helicopter from three different countries embassy in less that three years it is simply not possible to credibly make the the argument that 80+ million Americans are ready to vote for Joe Biden.
Not even if he’s running against Trump.
And while that credibility has never stopped corrupt machines in Democrat strongholds before there are an awful lot of districts and states where such machines do not exist and an awful lot of Democrats without that insurance policy that do not like the prospect That’s what it really comes down to.
A societal seismic shift, a black swan moment, occurred for the American elite, our “betters,” on April 1. Yep, April Fools Day, but the joke was on the elites. It was April 1 when on his–yes his–Instragram page, the transgendered influencer, Dylan Muvlaney, announced his sponsorhip deal with Bud Light, a beer brewed by Anheuser-Busch that is, or was, favored mainly by macho types.
The backlash was immediate. A boycott of the brew–with conservative celebrities leading the charge began–and Anheuser-Busch has since lost $5 billion in value.
Receiving the blame for this debacle is Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, who went on a leave of absence last week.
It’s likely that Bud Light triggered a tripwire, likely, to use Bill Maher’s words, Americans are angry because “they’ve had an agenda shoved down their throat.” Like the dimwitted sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, many elites, particularly in the media, believe transgendered women are women. Most Americans disagree.
And most Americans, unless they are woke, aren’t dopes. They know that males have an inherent physical advantage over women in most sports. If they decide to think about it–they know that the annual physical for Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health who is transgendered, consists of a prostate exam. They are aware that after “gender-affirming” surgeries, some trans people want to switch back.
And these same folks are fed up with being called a bigot or some sort of “phobe” when they raise their objections to the transgender ideological movement.
And they are sick of transgendered women appearing in clothing ads wearing garments designed for females.
As for the elites, many of whom like Heinerscheid have an Ivy League education, they’re the types of folks who don’t interact with smelly people who drink Bud Light. These smug know-it-alls are stupefied that the Mulvaney sponsorship has damaged the brand.
The elites live in their bubble, which makes them quite vulnerable to a black swan moment.
What has happened to Bud Light takes me back to 1979 and the Disco Demolition stunt that was part of a Chicago White Sox Teen Night promotion during a twi-night doubleheader with the Detroit Tigers. Oh, “Disco Sucks” wasn’t just a Chicago thing, I saw my first “Disco Sucks” T-shirt a year earlier on sale on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland.
I was a 17-year-old when Steve Dahl, a morning disc jockey for rock station WLUP-FM, began humorously “blowing up” disco records during his show. He’d play some crappy–aren’t they all?–disco tune for thirty-seconds or so, and then blow them up, not for real, but with sound effects. Dahl also took his act on the road, including a mock “takeover” of a suburban disco club, and the same thing happened at each event. Crowd control was an issue–too many people in too small of a space.
Surely, Mike Veeck, the son of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, thought that Comiskey Park, the home of the White Sox, could comfortably host Dahl and his minions, known as the Insane Coho Lips. The ballpark had a capacity of 45,000.
But the doubleheader sold out and there were an estimated thirty thousand others outside Comiskey Park clamoring to get in. Teens who deposited disco records at the turnstiles were admitted for 98 cents, which was dirt cheap even in 1979.
Dahl, in faux military garb, as you’ll see in the YouTube clip, exploded the records in spectacular fashion as the Insane Coho Lips chanted “disco sucks” following the conclusion of the first game of the doubleheader, a White Sox defeat. Immediately afterwards, about 7,000 of the rockers stormed the field and a riot broke out, one that included destroying the batting cage and igniting the crate from where the records were exploded. It was rock and roll’s first saturnalia. Police in riot gear promptly ended Disco Demolition 90 minutes later, and because the field was deemed by the umpires as unsafe for play, the second game was forfeited to the Tigers.
I watched the game at home on television with my parents and my brother. I hated disco and loved rock and roll, so I looked on with mixed emotions because I was also a Sox fan. I didn’t object when my brother pointed at me and said, “Hey, mom and dad, there are thousands of them on the TV, who are just like your son, tearing up the field.” Hey, don’t forget, I was 17 at the time.
Retro historians, often people who were born years after Disco Demolition, have tried to turn that night into a racist or anti-gay thing. Wrong. The people I knew who listened to disco were shallow and vapid–just like the music. It was love at first sight for them.
Here’s the disco black swan moment.
The Disco Demolition coverage from the media, particularly the national media, was one of shock. Even more so than now, the elite media was based in New York, and they were the people who hung out at disco’s hallowed temple, Studio 54 in Manhattan. They lived in their ’70s bubble, one that didn’t include people who loved rock music and wore “Disco Sucks” T-shirts.
Up until Steve Dahl blew up those records, disco was seemingly everywhere–on TV shows, in commercials, and in the movies, most notably, with John Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever. Rock acts, including the Rolling Stones, the Kinks (sadly, one of my favorite bands), and Rod Stewart, recorded songs with a disco beat.
But post-Disco Demolition Night, the media, as well as the advertising and marketing “experts,” realized, after the totality of the riot, that more people hated disco than liked it. Disco didn’t die that night–even a freight train experiencing engine problems can’t be stopped on a dime, but disco went into a fatal tailspin. A month after Disco Demolition, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, a disco album, was released. It enjoyed brisk sales and a lot of airplay. But Jacko’s next album, Thriller, was more of an R&B album, it even included the King of Pop’s only hard rock song, “Beat It,” which was graced by guitar work from Eddie Van Halen.
Rockers had stopped cutting disco tracks well before Thriller was released.
A couple of weeks before Off the Wall arrived in record stores, principal photography began on a movie starring the Village People, Discoland . . . Where the Music Never Stops. Sensing trouble because of the anti-disco backlash, the film’s producer, Allan Carr, changed the name of his project to Can’t Stop the Music. It’s remembered as a legendary Hollywood box office bomb.
As the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.” One of supporting actors in Can’t Stop the Music was Bruce Jenner, who now goes by Caitlyn.
By the early 1980s, the expression “As dead as disco” was common.
Transgenderism isn’t going away. Over my life I’ve known a few men who have gone thru procedures that allows them, sort of, to live as women. Fine, it’s their life. If, as an adult, men and women want to transform themselves into something different, well, no one should stop them. The same goes for people who want to obliterate their faces with tattoos.
On the other hand, don’t shove your choice down our throats and demand us to celebrate you.
In the advertising and marketing world, using transgendered spokespeople to promote mainstream products just might be as dead as disco.
No one wants to be the next Alissa Heinerscheid. Her job was to sell Bud Light, not to drive people to avoid it.
There was never a Can’t Stop the Music sequel.
Marketing people must not be good at math. One percent of the population identifies as transgendered. Which means of course means 99 percent doesn’t.
A Port St. Lucie gay pride parade has been canceled and other pride events have been restricted to people 21 years and older in anticipation of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signing a bill meant to keep children out of drag shows.
The Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast posted Wednesday on Facebook that the decision to change this Saturday’s Pridefest events was made after multiple conversations with Port St. Lucie officials.
“We hope that everyone understands that this is definitely not what we wanted at all and are working with the city to assure our safety as well as produce a positive event,” the post said.
A Florida city has canceled a gay pride parade for this weekend and restricted another LGBT event to people who are 21 and older in anticipation of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signing a bill that protects children from lewd displays.
Florida’s Senate Bill 1438 passed the state Senate a week ago and cleared all hurdles in the state House on Wednesday.
The bill, which prohibits exposing children to “adult live performances,” is awaiting DeSantis’ signature.
Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast has canceled the parade portion of Pridefest in Port St. Lucie when it was concluded they couldn’t keep children from seeing it. They wrote on Facebook:
In a Facebook post the group stated:
“As all of you know, the political climate that we are currently in has us all very concerned for our community. After multiple meetings with city officials, it is with a heavy heart that Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast has to announce that this weekend’s Pridefest will now be a 21 and older event.
“The city has decided that with the likelihood that the Governor will sign the latest bill into effect this evening, that we will need to be on the side of caution and has required us to make this necessary change. We are obviously upset and dishearten[ed] that it has come to this. We also regret to announce that we will have to cancel our plans to bring back our beloved parade.”
I must confess I’m rather confused by the cancellations of these parades.
We have been assured by our friends on the left that the Trans and Gay community are as family friendly as you can get and have absolutely no interesting in making lewd displays to kids and that anybody who suggests that they are “groomer” or “grooming kids” is simply a transphobic bigot. In fact on some social platforms you can be banned for suggesting anything of the sort.
YET THESE VERY SAME PEOPLE HAVE DECIDED THAT THEY ARE NOT CAPABLE OF HOLDING A PARADE WITHOUT LEWD DISPLAYS THAT WOULD VIOLATE THE LAW IF DISPLAYED TO CHILDREN!
For a whole lot of years a lot of people have been pointing out that the so called “Gay Pride” displays were basically live sex shows being paraded in front of kids but these complaints were at best ignored and at worst met with cries of “bigot”
Who knew that all it took was a governor willing to lead and a legislature not afraid of the wrath of the MSM to nip this in the bud.
Closing thought: Given the constant attacks on Ron DeSantis by the media and the Trump campaign it will be interesting to see if any of Trump’s surrogates decide to hit him over this.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 