2010 may have been an encouraging year for political conservatives, but it wasn't so rosy for America's culture. The most depressing result was the Second Circuit Court of Appeals granting our television networks the right to employ the nastiest curse words in front of children at any hour of the broadcast day.
You may have never heard of the 17-year-old actress Taylor Momsen, but she represents everything that's wrong with pop culture today. At 7, she starred as the adorable Cindy Lou Who in Jim Carrey's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," but there's nothing adorable in what she's done lately.
When ABC's Barbara Walters deems Sarah Palin one of the year's "Most Fascinating People," it's a backhanded compliment. Walters knows Palin has an adoring fan base, and she's definitely not part of it. When the Dec. 2 special began, Walters greeted Palin with "Many people find the thought of you as president a little scary."
Derrick Burts, 24, started working as a porn-film actor in June. By October, he'd contracted the HIV virus. The AP story on Burts contained this jaw-dropping sentence: "He said he began to have doubts about the business after contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes in his first month of work, but was convinced to keep working."
On Dec. 7, the notorious radical mastermind of WikiLeaks turned himself in on a sexual assault charge in London. But in the liberal media, the condemnations are few. There are no real enemies to the media elite's left, especially if they can be (very loosely) identified with journalism. Julian Assange may be highly motivated to cripple American "imperialism," but his relentless efforts to disrupt American foreign policy is a good thing when the media are manipulating the government's reaction by choosing which leaks they will publish and promote.
America was founded on the principle of representative democracy: The government would make policy based on the consent of the governed. Liberal elitists have grown increasingly impatient with this unenlightened system, and more and more, they are relying on judicial activists to remake society in their desired image. Far from being tribunes of the people, these judges are honored by the media elite for going around public opinion -- and the Constitution -- whenever the liberal impulse beckons.
Nobody expected that George W. Bush's book, "Decision Points," was going to compare to the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. As expected, book reviewers found it wanting as a literary work. But still, every book by an ex-president is seen as an opportunity for legacy-polishing and the press is most accommodating.
Liberal Democrats show no signs of reading their washout at the polls as a reason to shift to the center. President Obama told "60 Minutes" his only mistake was he passed some major legislation, but he didn't focus enough on the messy "how" -- as in "how it's risky to pass an Obamacare bill that a majority says it doesn't want."
On Election Day, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Schwarzenegger vs. Entertainment Merchants Association. The irony of this case name was obvious: The celebrated violent-action-hero governor of California had signed a bill into law in 2005 forbidding the sale of ultraviolent video games to minors, a law that lower federal courts prevented from ever going into effect.
National Public Radio's firing of Juan Williams tells you all you need to know about the radical, and thoroughly intolerant, left. Williams is a liberal, but still, he isn't liberal enough. The idea that he would acknowledge a mere thought of discomfort at the idea of people in "Muslim garb" on airplanes in a post-9/11 world became a firing offense. It didn't matter that he prefaced it with all the perfunctory and politically correct disclaimers about not being a bigot and we shouldn't blame all Muslims for terrorism.
