Harry Stein reviews Greg Gutfield’s new book.

Greg Gutfeld, to clue in those who make a habit of using the nighttime to sleep, is the host of Fox News’ Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld (weekdays at 3 AM, Eastern!). He presides over the most unpredictable hour of political commentary on the tube, and arguably the funniest. Indeed, in a media universe where the most fawned-over satirists (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher) run from hard to harder left, and where conventional liberal wisdom flatters itself with the fiction that those on the other side of the political spectrum don’t even know the meaning of cutting edge, Gutfeld stands out almost as much for his stunningly frank conservative/libertarian point of view as for his wit and daring. Little wonder that the show appeals to more or less the same demographic as Stewart’s.

In fact, the comparisons with the Comedy Central star are inevitable—except that, lacking a stable of writers and doing his show on a shoestring, Gutfeld is far more spontaneous and, yes, fearless.

In The Bible of Unspeakable Truths, his very funny compendium of life lessons, Gutfeld tells how he began his ideological journey rightward. He was a liberal in his California high school and one day found himself representing the anti-nuke side in a classroom debate on mutually assured destruction—pretty much a gimme, he says, since “no one wants to die” and “weapons only exist to hurt people, and hurting people is wrong.” Not to mention that (and, this being high school, above all) his opponent was a classic nerd. So he won the debate, if only by offering up a series of well-timed wisecracks about the other kid. Yet along the way, Gutfeld realized the nerd was right and he was wrong, because what he said “came from the brain, not from the heart, and it was packed with facts, logic.” And he’d “explained the principles of ‘peace through strength’ so clearly that I could no longer pretend to believe in the bullshit I believed in.”

As the media windbags like to say, full disclosure: a decade or so ago, when Gutfeld was editor of Men’s Health magazine, I not only worked with him, but had a hand in his abrupt departure from the place. I was heading a team of writer/researchers for a back-to-school section entitled “The 10 Most Male-Friendly, and the 10 Most Male-Unfriendly Colleges in America.” The ratings were as impartial as we could make them, based on such factors as the number of male-bashing women’s studies courses, the severity of campus speech codes, and the impact (or relative lack thereof) of Title IX on men’s sports programs. But when the section appeared, the (feminist) head of the family that owned the magazine was the opposite of delighted and, as I later heard, there followed a confrontation in which she and Gutfeld told each other precisely where to go.

In The Bible of Unspeakable Truths, Gutfeld tells all sorts of people where to go, from journalists and assorted politicians to foreign dictators and those who go around claiming to “live life to the fullest.” In fact, he tends to be especially annoyed by the sense of smug satisfaction with which contemporary liberals habitually regard their own most irritating behaviors. Of a self-esteem movement that has everywhere traded the character- building rough and tumble of real life for an idealized world of everybody’s-a-winner, he notes, “we are left with a rotted carcass of a culture where the feeling of accomplishment can be derived without accomplishing anything at all.” All that remains is to “wait for those fanatics who still believe in winning to invade and remind us what it’s like to lose.”

Generally the Left is offended when someone makes a buck. Unless, of course, they make it trashing the President. It seems Scott McClellan was planning to write nice.

Reading through McClellan’s original book proposal, obtained by Politico.com, it is clear that before his editor Peter Osnos took the book on a sharp leftward turn, McClellan wanted to turn the tables on foes in the press gallery including far-left columnist Helen Thomas and NBC correspondent David Gregory.

“I came to know and respect those who were assigned to the White House beat. They are solid professionals, but rarely scrutinized or put under the microscope. I will take a look at notable personalities in the White House Briefing Room, including David Gregory and Helen Thomas. I anticipate an entire chapter about the former,” McClellan writes in his proposal.

According to McClellan, America’s elite journalists have a dramatic problem with political diversity which in turn leads them to skew the political debate in a leftward direction. The media are in a “constant state of denial” when it comes to admitting this.

Hold on, maybe McClellan is part of a Karl Rove plot to make the news media look bad. After all, they are proving McClellan’s original thesis by glorifying this slop while refusing to review Douglas Feith’s book.

A famed novelist with a racist point of view is perfectly fine with the elitist left in America. Here’s Phillip Roth interviewed in Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Do you still care about politics? Are you following the 2008 election?

Roth: Unfortunately, yeah. I didn’t, until about two weeks ago — until then it wasn’t real. Then I watched the New Hampshire primary debates, and the Republicans are so unbelievably impossible. I watched the Democratic ones and became interested in Obama. I think I’ll vote for him.

SPIEGEL: What made you interested in Obama?

Roth: I’m interested in the fact that he’s black. I feel the race issue in this country is more important than the feminist issue. I think that the importance to blacks would be tremendous. He’s an attractive man, he’s smart, he happens to be tremendously articulate. His position in the Democratic Party is more or less okay with me. And I think it would be important to American blacks if he became president.

SPIEGEL: It could change society, couldn’t it?

Roth: Yes, it could. It would say something about this country, and it would be a marvelous thing. I don’t know whether it’s going to happen. I rarely vote for anybody who wins. It’s going to be the kiss of death if you write in your magazine that I’m going to vote for Barack Obama. Then he’s finished!

It would say what? That black people can advance? That since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the US has seen self-made black billionaires?

Seen Time-Warner and American Express, the biggest companies in their field, run by black CEOs?

Seen two black Secretaries of State?

Seen white athletes at Duke railroaded for rape based on the flakey testimony of a black stripper?

SPIEGEL: The discussions around Obama remind us of your figure Coleman Silk, the hero of “The Human Stain,” who is black with unusually light skin and then invents a Jewish biography. What we mean is the questions of belonging, of right and wrong behavior. Is Barack Obama black enough?

Roth: I know this discussion goes on, but I think it will disappear if he gets the nomination. The reality of his running will wash that away. Anybody who’s half white and half black is considered black anyway. That’s one drop of blood.

SPIEGEL: For whites to consider him black, yes. But the question is whether the blacks consider him black.

Roth: They will once the election goes on. If he gets the nomination.

SPIEGEL: Do you actually believe that Obama could change Washington or could change politics?

Roth: I’m interested in what merely his presence would be. You know, who he is, where he comes from, that is the change. That is the same thing with Hillary Clinton, just who she is would create a gigantic change. As for all that other rhetoric about change, change, change — it’s pure semantics, it doesn’t mean a thing. They’ll respond to particular situations as they arise.

Why is this racist? If Roth ruled out voting for Obama because he’s black, there’d be no question that his attitude is racist. The opposite is equally true.

If you attended a non-traditional wedding during the 1970s, you no doubt heard a few quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s bestselling book, The Prophet, during the service. Sample:

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Gibran lags only Shakespeare and Lao-tzu as a best-selling poet. The first printing of The Prophet in 1923 quickly sold out and sold steadily ever since. To date nine millions copies have been printed in English alone. In the 1960s, sales zoomed to nearly 5,000 copies a week.

While touring Lebanon in 1973, an Arabic speaking friend took me to Gibran’s native village. I was introduced as a distant American relative and greeted warmly. (Indeed, I was greeted warmly everywhere in Lebanon.) But they gave me special access to Gibran’s childhood home. I felt honored.

I knew nothing of Gibran the man until reading the January New Yorker. Which was no accident:

Part of the reason there were no real biographies is that little was known about Gibran’s life, and the reason for that is that he didn’t want it known. One point that seems firm is that he was born in Lebanon, in a village called Bsharri, in 1883. At that time, Lebanon was part of Syria, which in turn was part of the Ottoman Empire. Gibran, by his account, was a brooding, soulful child. From his earliest years, he said, he drew constantly—painting was his first art and, for a long time, as important to him as writing—and he communed with nature. When a storm came, he would rip off his clothes and run out into the torrent in ecstasy. His mother, Kamileh, got others to leave her strange boy alone. “Sometimes,” Gibran later recalled, “she would smile at someone who came in . . . and lay her finger on her lip and say, ‘Hush. He’s not here.’ ”

He wasn’t in Lebanon long, either. His father got busted for embezzlement, leaving the family destitute, so his mother emigrated with the kids to Boston. His timing was perfect, arriving at a time when…

…In European art, this was the period of the Decadents. Theosophy, espoused by Madame Blavatsky, became a craze. People went to séances, dabbled in drugs, and scorned the ugly-hearted West in favor of the more spiritual East. Above all, they made a religion of art. Day, thirty-two years old and financially independent, was a leader of the Boston outpost of this movement. He wore a turban, smoked a hookah, and read by candlelight.

He did serious work, however. He and his friends founded two arts magazines, and he was a partner in a publishing house that produced exquisite books. By the eighteen-nineties, though, Day’s main interest was photography. He particularly liked to photograph beautiful young boys of “exotic” origin, sometimes nude, sometimes in their native costumes, and he often recruited them from the streets of the South End. When the thirteen-year-old Gibran turned up at Day’s door, in 1896, he became one of the models. Day was especially taken with Gibran. He made him his pupil and assistant, and he introduced him to the literature of the nineteenth century, the Romantic poets and their Symbolist inheritors.

To say more is to spoil the story. Suffice it to say, Gibran turns out to be less of an inspired poet than an ambitious user who was in the right place at the right time with the right message.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Read the whole thing.