text: Author Mamet Tells Newsmax: Why I Turned My Back on Liberalism | Newsmax.com
  Tags: David Mamet | Benjamin Netanyahu | Barack Obama
  Author Mamet Tells Newsmax: Why I Turned My Back on Liberalism
  By Martin Gould and Tim Collie | Sunday, 19 June 2011 11:34 AM
  Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, who characterizes himself as a one-time "brain-dead liberal," has undergone a conversion to conservatism, he tells Newsmax.TV.
  Mamet said his trek to the right began several years ago. "It's like when you hear a word once and you've never heard it before and you hear it three more times that same day.
  "I had a bunch of things happen to me over the last few years,and I started to put them all together and they spelled 'mother.'"
  Mamet has just written a book, "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture"
  He said he started to seek out the conservative viewpoint because, in Hollywood, he just didn't know that it existed. "I did a few years' worth of reading and came to a different understanding of economics and philosophy."
  But Mamet, who won his Pulitzer for the play "Glengarry Glen Ross" and also wrote such classics as "American Buffalo" and "Speed-the-Plow," said he does not want to get more involved in politics or endorse a candidate for the next election. "I don't know better than the next guy," he pointed out.
  "My lesson is that the three branches of government, having failed to uphold the Constitution and the press having failed to uphold its responsibility to tell the truth, there's nobody home but us chickens.
  "Us chickens are the votership and we citizens are going to have to make up our minds and vote according to the understanding of our responsibilities."
  Mamet's rightward turn is evident when he says the United States needs a president like Benjamin Netanyahu rather than Barack Obama.
  Mamet says he noticed the difference between the two world leaders during the Israeli prime minister's address to Congress last month.
  "I heard [Obama's] speech, and I read Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech and I said to myself, 'Why can't we, America, have a leader like Netanyahu because we sure as hell need one," Mamet said during an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV.
  Mamet said his fellow Chicagoan comes from a long line of presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, "who have never worked a day in their life."
  "It's the vision of the anointed, that they had somehow been anointed and they know better than everyone else around them," he said.
  Mamet had particularly harsh words for Obama's Middle East policies. "To see the left's abandonment of Israel was profoundly sobering," he said.
  "The Israelis, and us Jews by extension, are now being treated basically as sub-humans by the left, that is to say people to whom the international law and traditional considerations of right and wrong, traditional considerations of mutual responsibilities to allies, did not apply.
  "There is no difference between this view and the view that 15th-century Jews were going around poisoning the wells and kidnapping the Christian children for their blood," he said, adding, "The only difference is that the left of today is saying it is ridiculous to think that Jews delight in the killing of Christian children — of course they don't, they delight in the killing of Muslim children!"
  The days when Jews voted en bloc for Democrats could be coming to an end, but it will take time as it is ingrained, generation after generation, he said.
  "It takes a great effort because it feels like two things: it feels like treason and it feels like heresy," he said.
  Editor's note: To get David Mamet's new book, "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture," at a good price — Click Here Now.
  Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, who characterizes himself as a one-time brain-dead liberal, has undergone a conversion to conservatism, he tells Newsmax.TV. Mamet said his trek to the right began several years ago. It s like when you hear a word once and...