Shoulda Shorted A&E

I am regretting one of the greatest missed opportunities for a killing on Wall Street since I hesitated to invest in Chrysler, selling at 3 in 1980, sent Lee Iacocca to Congress to plead for government aid.  A year later they were selling at 65.  Oh, if only I had shorted A&E last week!  I tried.  But I kept looking for “Asses and Elitists” in my broker’s list.  How was I to know it stood for Arts and Entertainment?

            Now it turns out that Drudge Report has a link to Mailonline, an entertainment website that religiously follows Miley Cyrus and Paris Hilton as long as they stay naked and don’t pick up a Bible in jail.  Mailonline says that A&E was doing a set-up against Phil Robertson.  They arranged the interview with GQ, had a representative there listening, made no attempt to talk to Phil or coach him, and then ex post facto ran headlines condemning his speech along with a GLAAD spokesman. (Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that A&E used  that Latin term meaning “after the fact”.  Nobody in Hollywood or NY uses Latin terms and they are still ticked that Mel Gibson used it in his Passion movie. They wanted hip hop slang.) And that A&E did this because the network originally had a concept of the Duck Dynasty show as a comedy where you and I would laugh at a bunch of backwards rednecks.  But, like All In The Family years ago when the viewers began to empathize with Archie rather than hate him, viewers began to laugh With the Robertsons, not At them.  This made the New York TV types very nervous and they decided to do a hatchet job on Phil to bring him into line.  But as everyone knows by now, Phil was once an old rocker who got messed up on drugs and everything else, gave his life to Jesus Christ, and now gives numerous Christian convocations and testimonies.  And the family is tight.  They aren’t going to give in to PC bullying.  Probably the show goes off the air after this next season on A&E, because A&E would lose liberal viewers who like to watch crime scene horrors, mental patients, and people bidding on abandoned storage rentals which have been secretly seeded with a few valuables—“reality TV”, as NY TV types say. Do you see why I never dreamed “A&E” was about Arts and Entertainment?

            A&E never dreamed the Duck Guy would get so much support.  Now they are in a fix for if they relent on his dismissal, they look weak to the left.  If they don’t, it’s all over for Duck Dynasty on their channel. Family will probably refuse to renew.  Now there is a contractual period, probably about a year thereafter, where the Robertsons are forbidden to take their show and go to another channel.  But this too shall pass since the family is now estimated to be worth $400 million through duck call manufacturing and a retail contract with Walmart.  Did I mention that Walmarts all over America have sold out of Duck Dynasty products this week?  Wonder why.  Perhaps you can still get a few at Bass Pro Shops.  It is doubtful that Walmart will ditch the Ducks the way they did Paula Dean. Plus the Robertsons have another show on the Outdoor Channel called Buck Commander.

            At any rate, Duck Dynasty is the most popular show on cable television, with 9 million viewers per week.  Compare this to a single episode of Bill O’Reilly at 2.3 million or that idiot thing on History channel about a pawn shop which has 3 million.  (Can anyone explain to me what pawn shops have to do with history?  I mean other than the fact that they still don’t know who has the original print of the Constitution because Continental Congress got so poor during the Revolution that they had to collateralize it and some impatient pawn vulture sold it as outhouse paper.) So then shorting A&E is probably the financial move of the year.

            GLAAD is also not so glad they self-report.  It turns out they feel victimized by the backlash.  Whodda guessed this! They launched full bore into how they were discriminated against by Robertson’s comments.  But if a thoughtful person considers what has happened, it seems that no gay person suffered.  Phil Robertson did.  So here’s the inside scoop from a gay person I watched on MSNBC last year.  He said that practically the entire reason for gay activism is that many gays ultimately feel bad about their life and want it accepted by churches.  But the Bible has some things to say about homosexuality not being according to God’s preference, i.e., it is sin. (God labels a lot of our activities such. Correct response is to be humble and beg forgiveness.)  And so what gay people want is for the rest of the world to stop telling them they aren’t doing things right.  “Stop making us feel guilty.” Okay, but the One who wrote the book wants to talk to you.

Did I mention that the guy who conceived Duck Dynasty for A&E was a former porn movie star?