I once complained to Donna Reed about all the rudderless young men in charge of the Networks.

“It’s not that they’re young men, Paul,” she said to me. “It’s just that they’re the wrong young men.”

When America’s children realize how they’ve been cheated of a quality education and ennobling entertainment, don’t act surprised when this nation’s youth turn on you. On the issue of unfunded mandates alone…is it ten, twenty, thirty trillion dollars?…the Under 30 crowd you’re expecting to pick up the tab for your leisure years will have good reason to revolt.

Kids are built to smell hypocrisy. You were. I was. Admit it. The “do as I say, not as I do” generation, largely composed of Boomers who started turning 60 on January 1st 2006…80 million of them…one every 7 seconds…are going to “have a heavy reckoning to make.”

Common sense and our core understanding of human nature have been buried under decades of spin and propaganda, false imagery and outright historical fabrication that will soon engulf us all.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in what passes for Popular Entertainment. Popular television shows like CSI would make you think that smart and pretty people are on the job when it comes to solving crimes, but the unsolved murders in our nation are running about 60%!

“24″ plays to huge audiences and everyone knows who you are talking about when you say the name “Jack.” The same overwhelmingly liberal mind that creates this sideshow is the political mind that denies our government the tools required to defend against the most serious threat this nation has ever faced.

Why do we listen to the education establishment when we can see with our own eyes the result of declining test scores as we interact with sub-literate cashiers who are cast adrift when the power goes off, witness the celebration of stupidity and coarseness in the world of music and sports, and we’ve surrendered our streets to drug dealers and thugs?

In politics and entertainment it’s all Circuses and Sideshows. The survival equation for a system that has lost its nerve has not changed in thousands of years of human history. Deny. Amuse. Divert. Give the folks anything but the truth.

When you’re wrong, never admit it. Never say you’re sorry. Avoid at all costs the consequences of your actions. Blame others. Tell the Big Lie.

I’ve had enough, haven’t you? This line in the sand was crossed, for me at least, in the Dakota Fanning travesty. Operating outside the mainstream of Hollywood a 2nd time screenwriter assumed the indefensible position that her right to hire a minor to portray a sexually explicit role that the writer created somehow trumped that child’s right to be free of abuse and exploitation…and for a time, investors and enablers of all stripes swallowed this tripe as if they’d been trained to accept all that the entertainment industry throws out at them.

These assaults on our sensibilities are endlessly dangerous. They are deliberate. “We made this movie to encourage victims to speak out.” This is the back-end of the cow sort of nonsense that forgets that far more perpetrators will likely be created by this movie than the number of victims who suddenly come forward.

Dakota Fanning is twelve years old. She first read the screenplay when she was eleven, which for some people constitutes a crime in and of itself. The rules change in a collaborative medium like film when you deliberately set out to hire a Minor who cannot give “informed consent.” Sorry Hollywood. 1st Amendment protections do not apply when your “expression” requires the active and paid participation of a minor.

No one is older than they are. The historical record, even in Hollywood, is clear. Brooke Shields in “Pretty Baby” had to endure the unwanted attentions of a stalker named Mark Robert Bailey (he was finally jailed in 2000, 22 years after the release of Brooke’s movie.

Jodi Foster as “Iris” in “Taxi Driver” was the fixation of John Hinckley, for God’s sake, the man who turned his desire to possess “Iris” into an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

Yet the liberal machine that has turned its back on reason tried to tell us that this will not be the predictable outcome for Dakota. Educators and Prosecutors alike reflexively came to the aid of their Fellow Travelers.

Like the marchers in Washington DC this weekend, they simply don’t care how many die or are savaged by their crooked reasoning. Why should they? No one has called them to account for failing schools, growing cultural coarseness, let alone Castro, Mao, Stalin or the bloody repression of Pol Pot. Their sacred idealism is more important to them than death on a monumental scale, and they are getting rich taking this position.

The richness of our nation’s resources, they say, are not to be utilized, while they live on private jets and sleep in homes with more square footage than love. The confections they whip up as entertainment are poisoned with disparaging portrayals of men in general, Dads in particular, and fictional children who effortlessly solve the puzzles of life because they are Good, don’t you see.

Wake up, America. The primary architects and apologists for what passes for entertainment are the same people. Money and privilege are their aims…but not for you, or me, or anyone who catches them at their game.

“Witch hunt” will be their final defense, conveniently ignoring the uncontestable truth that Hollywood was infiltrated on a colossal scale in the 50’s. The KGB archives prove it. Ronald Reagan knew it. That’s why he broke from Hollywood. He saw the spreading poison attacking everything Americans hold dear. A foreign and discredited ideology now holds sway in Hollywood.

This is a great deal of thought to be riding the frail shoulders of a twelve year-old actress, but I’ve seen and lived this act before. Sue Lyon. Dominique Dunne. Teresa Saldana. In a culture absent awareness and education in its own history, you see, movies take on a life of their own, and the images never, ever go away.

No one can tell me what comes next for Dakota Fanning, who in real life is entering the 7th grade. Close your eyes and remember when you were in the 7th grade. Were the boys well mannered and sweet? Did the girls all accept you? Of course not.

No one can tell me who is sitting out there “in the dark” with a hand in his lap, dreaming of taking possession of this little girl. This isn’t some abstract argument, friends. This is real.

In Hollywood, to put it bluntly, the common understanding of the flaws within each of us doesn’t exist in their breasts. It’s edited out to accommodate self-esteem run amok.

Great evils are arising beyond our shores, yet Hollywood tries to tell us the problem lies here, in the very people that gave them the freedom to propagandize on the airwaves that belong to all of us without sanction. It’s time to tell them that our children will not be used to advance their cause, not in our schools or on our streets or in the media.

While welfare rolls swell, 5.5 million children go to work everyday in America. Dakota Fanning is just one of them. Dakota Fanning was employed to portray a rape victim on camera in North Carolina, which, like the United States itself, exempts the children in entertainment from federal child labor laws. Only two nations on this Earth have failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of a Child.

Somalia and the United States.

Once upon a time a very great man could confidently say, “In a contest of a thousand years no foreign power will ever take a drink of water from the Ohio River.”

President Lincoln didn’t know Hollywood.

I once told Melissa Gilbert, then President of Screen Actors Guild, who was beset on all sides by the politics of Left versus Far Left within the theatrical unions, that “creepy things were hiding beneath the rocks of Hollywood.”

She looked at me with those Laura Ingall eyes flashing and said, “The hell they’re hiding, Paul. They’re on top of those rocks sunning themselves.”

With Groundhog Day approaching it’s time we started to play the well known amusement park game where the little ground squirrels pop their heads up from the playing surface and you get to swing a club on their wee little heads.

Burrows and warrens are where some folks belong…especially those who by action, word or deed…or by silence, inaction or outright lies…excuse the sacrifice of a child for illusory ideology.

Dakota Fanning deserves better. So do we.

Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here