HH: ... Do you have any hope that he’s going to turn this around?2 - IN THE JPOST:
DM: Turn what, turn what around, Hugh?
HH: The economy, his administration, his, well, he’s incompetent as can be. He’s a failed presidency already.
DM: Well, how can you turn the economy around? The only way to turn the economy around is to let the economy go. For God’s sake, I mean, how many times must this be proved, that the money you give to the government is waste. The best that they’re going to do is give some of it back to the people who support them.
“There is a profound and ineradicable taint of anti-Semitism in the British,” he was quoted as saying by the Financial Times. “The paradigmatic Brit as far as the Middle East goes is [TE] Lawrence. That’s just the fact. Even before the oil was there, you loved the desert. It had all these wacky characters ... But there is a Jewish state there ratified by the United Nations and you want to give it away to some people whose claim is rather dubious.”3 - ON RUSHBO:
The combative playwright famed for his masterpiece "Glengarry Glen Ross" and scripts for films such as Wag the Dog and The Verdict declined to name names of living British authors with an allegedly anti-Semitic bent because of the U.K’s “horrendous libel laws” but said there were many.
... In the interview Mamet said he was an admirer of Republican Sarah Palin and opposed US President Barack Obama on several grounds including his perceived policies towards Israel.
“The question is can he run on his record in 2012 and the answer is no, because it’s abysmal,” he said. “He took a trillion dollars and where it went, nobody knows. He dismantled healthcare, he weakened America around the world, he sold out the state of Israel. All he’s got to run on is being a Democrat and indicting the other fellow.”
What were the catalysts that made you even question your liberalism?4 - IN THE FORWARD:
MAMET: Well, I think the first one was around the 2004 election, and I went to synagogue, as I do regularly. The rabbi was talking about political civility, and he said it's in the Judeo-Christian tradition that before you criticize someone you have to sit down with them and restate their position to them such that they'll say, "Yes, that's what I mean," and then they have to state your position to you so that you say, "Yes," so you both agree that you understand what the positions are, then you each introduce your facts. So I wanted to... I took the advice to heart. I said: "Well, as a good liberal I better be able to state the conservative position." (chuckles) So I started researching and I started reading, and it dawned on me that I was not a liberal, that although I could state the position of who I thought were my enemies, the conservatives, I could not rationally state the position of the liberals.
...
MAMET: Well, like Lincoln said: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong -- and I've got a good model for people saying, "Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between," and that's the state of Israel which has been defending itself daily against constant attack for 60 years from people whose avowed purpose is to kill every Jew in Israel and then to kill the rest of the Jews in the world. People on the left say, "Yes, but obviously if there's two parties to the dispute, the truth must lie somewhere in between," and I don't see where the truth lies in between in Israel and I really don't see where the truth lies in between the liberals and the conservatives. The liberals say, "Are you arguing there must be no government?" Of course not. I'm arguing that the government should be representative of the people's interests.
...
MAMET: I was a liberal, which meant that I voted for the liberal team. It meant that... You know what it meant, Rush? It meant that I was excused from thinking.
RUSH: Were you born liberal and then confirmed --
MAMET: Sure. Yeah.
RUSH: -- or you just didn't question the way you were?
MAMET: Sure. My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer -- a very hardworking guy, a one horse labor lawyer -- and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble. I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, "Wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing."
Mamet sums up the reasons behind his dramatic conversion from left to right in this pull quote from the book:AWESOME.
My interest in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen ‘the government’ commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic error nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced…... Slate zeroed in on Mamet’s revealing that he is a big fan of Sarah Palin.“I am crazy about her. Would she make a good candidate for president? I don’t know but she seems to have succeeded at everything she put her hand to,” the dramatist reportedly said. Gapper went on to say Mamet compared Palin to a late friend in Cabot, Vt., where he owns a cabin. His friend was “a hardworking guy, a man of honor who was looking out for the town’s interests. I thought of him when I saw Sarah Palin. She started with the PTA and then became the mayor and then governor [of Alaska]. I thought, well, OK. That’s someone who knows how to work.”
THAT MAMET SAW THE LIGHT GIVES ME GREAT HOPE.
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