Linked by Glenn Reynolds, who has his theory as to why the Cartoon Network is more popular. Thanks.
Since it seems we’ll never have Fox News at the airports, is there any chance of switching from CNN to the Cartoon Network there? It would certainly soothe the nerves of the passengers better than CNN, as well as provide more honest reporting.
ABC, which Tom Hanks called home during his Bosom Buddies salad days claims, “Hanks Angers Conservatives.” But Victor Davis Hanson takes exception to the legacy media’s attempting to claim that the backlash against Tom Hanks’ racialist remarks to Time magazine when promoting his series on World War II in the pacific that’s currently airing on (Time-Warner-owned) HBO is purely partisan-driven:
Tom Hanks said this to Douglas Brinkley in a Time interview: “Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
Some of us dissected this nonsense point by point. In subsequent remarks Hanks did not back away from his theses that the Pacific war was predicated on racism (I wonder whether our WWII alliances with China and the Philippines, or our prior alliance in WWI with Japan, were as well?), and thus similar to our attitudes in the current war on terror. (Racism apparently explains the American effort to foster democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia.)
What was strange is the media’s reaction to the reaction. Why is being appalled by Hanks’s infantile philosophizing a “right-wing” or “conservative” reaction? Would not liberals as well be angry that in blanket fashion, Hanks had reduced veterans’ efforts in the Pacific after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor (and to be followed by a magnanimous peace that fostered autonomous Japanese democracy) into largely a racist rage to annihilate?
At Big Hollywood, James Hudnall has a Climategate-related question. He asks, “What Will Television Do With All Their Scare-Programming?” Read the whole thing; there’s too much for me to quote to do it justice. But here’s the pith of the gist of the marrow, as James Lileks might say:
But two things happened last year that shot an arrow in the heart of the beast; one of the worst winters on record and Climategate. And the hits keep on coming. Now it turns out that NASA, who claimed for years that their data proves Global Warming is real, was actually just using CRU data all along. And the CRU couldn’t back up any of its data. In fact, they “lost the records” when they were forced to produce them. Oops!
So now these news channels who’ve been trumpeting the story as fact, all those cable networks who spent millions on documentaries hyping it, all those TV shows hawking green as the in color; they all look like fools. Or worse, they look like they were in on what will go down as one of the biggest scams in human history.
What would you do if you were in their position? It’s not hard to understand why they’re carrying on like Climategate never happened. They have a president in the White House as clueless as they are, pushing the Cap and Trade agenda as if those darn glaciers are just about melted. We have to do something fast! Not a moment too soon, kiddies.
The climate scam is worth trillions of dollars and who knows how many millions, if not billions have been spent to win over the public. Too bad the public is losing interest fast. People are increasingly saying it’s all made up or at best, exaggerated. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, The cat has left the bag. There’s no going back to the lies and spin. But our friends in the media are still living a lie. It’s like they threw a party and only their mom and a few friends showed up. What was once a hip thing to be a part of, like smoking, is fast becoming a loser tattoo on their foreheads.
The public’s trust is evaporating and it’s not helping that many in the media are circling the wagons. As their ratings drop and their Nielsens tank, as the suits upstairs start laying off staff, they’re going to have to deal with reality. Something they’ve tried to deny all these years. Yes, folks. The warm-mongers are in fact the deniers.
The economy is in a down-spiral. Telling people they need to cut back is like rubbing salt in their wounds. Promising them “green jobs” is like telling a 40 year old Santa Claus is coming to town.
A 1930s scare film such as Reefer Madness was seen as high camp by liberals by the time the 1970s rolled around, as were Jack Webb’s anti-communist efforts of the late ‘1950s. But seventies liberals, perhaps spurred on by the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, if not the actual contents, had plenty of fears of their own, and wanted you to share the cold sweat of their own brand of paranoia.
Recall the horrific slate of politically-oriented science fiction films that Hollywood churned out in-between 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1977’s Star Wars. Films such asSoylent Green, Silent Running and ZPG were obsessed with the Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation and deforestation that dominated the overculture of the time. Rollerball depicted a world controlled by giant corporations, at precisely the same time that Steve and Woz were cobbling together the first Apples in their Bay Area garage. They were followed by Leonard Nimoy’s cheesy synthesizer-scored In Search Of TV series a few years later, which explored Global Cooling, Killer Bees, Deadly Ants, and other ’70s obsessions.
Today, these ’70s efforts are seen as equally campy as Refer Madness became three or four decades after its release. The eco-doomsday films of the naughts, such as The Day After Tomorrow, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, and Al Gore’s own An Inconvenient Truth are well on the way to becoming late night camp TV themselves, and at much faster rate as their equally schlocky predecessors.
Perhaps someone can recut Al’s film and dub it “Climate Madness.” Maybe hire William Shatner to cut an exaggerated Jack Webb-style parody opening.
Who knows: “Climate Madness” could eventually even have the same impact on its genre as his wife Tipper’s efforts to curb raunchy lyrics in pop music.
Related: Zombie observes some camp Malthusian performance art on the Streets of San Francisco, here.
Connery’s overall performance was pretty awesome in Brian DePalma’s 1987 big screen version of The Untouchables, though the Oscar he won for best supporting actor is likely more for his overall career than his role in the movie itself. But Connery’s accent in the film is much more of his own Scottish brogue than anything authentically Irish sounding. So it’s not surprising that he made the cut in this collection of video clips assembled by the British Screen Rush Website of “The Worst Irish Accents In The History Of Cinema.”
Jules Crittenden reviews the first episode of Tom Hanks’ The Pacific miniseries on HBO, in light of Hanks recent shameful comments to Time magazine (owned by Time-Warner, which also owns the HBO channel and HBO Films, which co-produced the series). Jules writes:
If “The Pacific” delivers us blissfully out of the opening soap opera scenes and drops us unceremoniously into Guadalcanal, it does so without much of the context that illustrated the forging of a unit and the transformation of young men into warriors that was one of the strengths of BoB. The Guadalcanal scenes are beautifully shot but poorly edited, having the effect of being more of a horrific montage, lacking the impact they could have had, while the lead characters are effectively strangers. For all the nudge-nudge-get-it dialogue and meaningful looks, little effort has been made to put you cinematically into the minds of these young men. I also came away with the sense that the filmmakers are going to carefully balance out every Japanese atrocity with some example of the enemy’s humanity, every dehumanization of young American boys with an American boy’s thoughtful, chin-scratching realization that the hated Jap is just like him. A regrettable tendency to lecture, hector and handhold that underestimates the audience.
Jules adds, “would anyone expect them to bend over backwards to humanize the SS?” Didn’t The Reader, which I watched last week on DirecTV for the first time attempt to do just that? It begins — SPOILER ALERT! — as a sort of pedophilic version of The Night Porter with the genders reversed, then attempts to excuse the former SS guard character played by Kate Winslet for not knowing she was condemning Jews to death because she’s illiterate.
Can you say metaphor, boys und girls? I knew that you could. But as Ron Rosenbaum writes, in a spot-on review of the film last year at Salon:
Indeed, so much is made of the deep, deep exculpatory shame of illiteracy—despite the fact that burning 300 people to death doesn’t require reading skills—that some worshipful accounts of the novel (by those who buy into its ludicrous premise, perhaps because it’s been declared “classic” and “profound”) actually seem to affirm that illiteracy is something more to be ashamed of than participating in mass murder. From the Barnes & Noble Web site summary of the novel: “Michael recognizes his former lover on the stand, accused of a hideous crime. And as he watches Hanna refuse to defend herself against the charges, Michael gradually realizes that she may be guarding a secret more shameful than murder.” Yes, more shameful than murder!Lack of reading skills is more disgraceful than listening in bovine silence to the screams of 300 people as they are burned to death behind the locked doors of a church you’re guarding to prevent them from escaping the flames. Which is what Hanna did, although, of course, it’s not shown in the film. As I learned from the director at a screening of The Reader, the scene was omitted because it might have “unbalanced” our view of Hanna, given too much weight to the mass murder she committed, as opposed to her lack of reading skills. Made it more difficult to develop empathy for her, although it’s never explained why it’s important that we should.
Using extensive and fairly believable make-up effects, the film depicts Winslet’s heavily aged character spending decades in a prison cell rather than confess to her illiteracy. At the film’s climax, after teaching herself how to read — and keeping with the metaphor of the film, presumably beginning to understand the crimes she was involved in, Winslet’s character hangs herself from the ceiling of her prison cell, after first climbing on top of a desk containing the books that she had taken out from the prison library.
As Rod Lurie writes at the Huffington Post, the Reader’s coda adds one final insult on top of the the rest of its facile metaphors, all designed by author Bernhard Schlink to excuse his fellow Germans of their guilt:
The hollowest scene is the one I am sure was intended to be the film’s most redemptive. A grown up Michael goes to see a survivor of the very church burning Hanna was involved with. She lectures him about the camps and refuses the money Hanna has willed to her (though she accepts the tin the money came in). The beautiful Lena Olin plays the survivor. She is well dressed. Her New York apartment is large and gorgeously furnished, her art collection on display.
In the scenes preceding it we see Hanna. She has nothing. She is in bad health. She commits suicide.
So, the SS representative in the film ends up pathetic and sad and, by the way, not guilty of the crime for which she was sentenced.
The lone representative of the survivors is haughty and glamorous — a near perfect (and negative) stereotype of the wealthy European Jew in New York.
Guess whom the audience can relate to more?
So sure, I don’t have to imagine Hollywood bending over backwards to humanize the SS. I just watched it last week in HD on Showtime.
Don Imus, for one, is not surprised by Tom Hanks’ recent comments calling WWII and the War on Terrorism racist crusades undertaken by the United States.
First brought to his attention by “Imus in the Morning” producer Bernard McGuirk on the show, the remarks were news to the host – just not shocking news.
“Oh darn, what a surprise. We have another panty-wearing liberal dickweed from Hollywood — of course!” Imus told McGuirk.
Update: Via the Rhetorican on Twitter, a Wired interview with Katie King, the above video’s creator, and a shot by shot comparison with the Beasties’ original video by Spike Jonez:
Though whereas Seinfeld had a battery of first-class Hollywood writers to make it funny, this otherwise digitally-animated parody relies solely on the actual words of President Obama and his immediate coterie:
Tell what I really want to know: how can I get my hands on one?
After nine prototypes Martin Aircraft have an accurate expectation for how much a jetpack will cost, and suggest that at $86,000 it is pitched at the level of a high-end car. As sales and production volume increase they expect this to drop to the price of a mid-range car. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence; progress payments are made during manufacture with final payment due on delivery. Details and a deposit contract are available from their Martin Aircraft’s website.
And when will I be able drive it to work? Again it’s a waiting game as currently air traffic control technology is not yet advanced enough to cope with jetpacks, but the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is developing “highways in the sky” technology – 3D highways based on GPS tracks. Initial tests have been positive but the technology is unlikely to be implemented for another 10 years yet so for the meantime initial use will remain recreational as with jet-skis, snowmobiles and ultralights. Until then we’ll keep waiting and watching the sky…
Excuse me, I have to go mount a trailer hitch to the back of the Aston-Martin…
(Hat tip: Judd, Orrin Judd, of the New Hampshire Secret Service.)
Roger L. Simon notes the two big winners tonight, and writes that “The 2010 Academy Awards may not have marked the end of “liberal Hollywood” as we know it, but they certainly put a solid dent in it:”
With the pro-military “The Hurt Locker” winning over the enviro-pabulum of “Avatar” and Sandra Bullock garnering the Best Actress Oscar for a Christian movie, the times are a-changin’ at least somewhat, maybe even a lot.
But one thing is now certain. It is time for conservative, center-right and libertarian filmmakers to stop feeling sorry for themselves and go out and just do it. Their “victocrat” days are over. No more excuses. “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” have proven that it can be done. Get out of the closet, guys and gals. If you want to make a film with themes you believe in, quit whining about Industry prejudice and start writing that script and trying to get it made. That’s not an easy thing, no matter what your politics.
Right siders can take inspiration too from Sunday’s Oscar ceremonies themselves. They weren’t defamed for a moment. Missing in action was the usual libo-babble, no extended hymns to the cause du jour or ritual Bush-bashing. And Barack Obama wasn’t even mentioned. Not once. But the troops were – several times by Kathryn Bigelow.
And, yes, we can all take pleasure in her being the first woman to win Best Director, again no matter which side of the political spectrum we come from. She did a Helluva job.
And, oh yes, I thought Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did a reasonable job of hosting too – a lot better than the likes of Letterman, etc. They kept things moving along (except for the unbelievably tedious “salute to horror” and the traditionally soporific dance numbers). And didn’t you like the look on Sean Penn’s face when Bullock won for “The Blind Side”?
More tomorrow on Poliwood with Lionel Chetwynd.
While you’re waiting for Roger and Lionel’s next Poliwood, don’t miss this edition from February 16th, in which they compared the Hurt Locker to Avatar, and explained why a film with an $11 million budget is infinitely better moviemaking than one with a $237 million(!) budget. (and also last week’s edition, which reviewed the regressive mindset that produced the primitivistic Last Tango In Paris in 1972, versus The Blind Side.)
Update: In Chinatown, John Huston’s Noah Cross character told Jack Nicholson, “‘Course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” But as Tim Blair notes, a building can obtain “legendary” status remarkably quickly in today’s Hollywood; on the other hand it’s also the sort of town where actresses risk being “burnt at the steak” — nobody tell PETA!
As screenwriter William Goldman once quipped, “Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.” Reading Mark Steyn’s reprint of an article he wrote a decade ago about the 2000 Academy Awards is a reminder of how much rot has occurred in Hollywood, just in the last decade alone, during which Hollywood was largely asleep at the Steadicam:
`I see dead people’ from The Sixth Sense was the big line of the night, but I found myself thinking: I see dull people. Aside from Michael Caine, who was at least human, most of the other winners just read out lists of names, which is the equivalent of a box of Kwikkie Krapola breakfast cereal thanking his E-numbers. Why can’t the Academy just tell these butt-numbing yawn-mongers that all the people they want to thank will be listed on the official website but that they have to use their 45 seconds on TV to say something else? When Emil Jannings picked up the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Last Command in 1928, I’ll bet he said something more than simply thanking Tamsin Weiner, Doug Vest, Armand Croissant and everyone else in development at MiraWorks.
But it’s hard not to feel that these surly, charmless grunters really don’t have anything to say: they’re all credits and no show. The only contentious moment came when John Irving, screenwriter of The Cidar House Rules, dedicated his award to the fight to keep `a woman’s right to choose’ – not exactly a controversial stand with this crowd. In the Seventies, Bert Schneider, winner of Best Documentary Feature, read out a telegram from the Viet Cong. Then Frank Sinatra came on, attacked Dustin Hoffman and Francis Ford Coppola, and read out a disclaimer from the Academy about the Viet Cong stuff. Then a furious Shirley MacLaine attacked Sinatra because she too was a member of the Academy and no one had asked her if she’d wanted to dissociate herself from the Viet Cong. Then John Wayne said the Viet Cong guy was a pain in the ass. In those days, Hollywood was still diverse enough to have two points of view on any subject. Now it doesn’t have any view, just a lot of portentous generalities about how motion pictures `show us the truth in all our lives’.
With hindsight, the Seventies were the golden age of Oscar shows. It was fun when Marlon Brando had his award picked up by Sachem Littlefeather, Apache Indian and President of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, protesting about the treatment of Indians by Hollywood. It was even better when she turned out to be Maria Cruz, struggling actress and Miss American Vampire of 1970. It was touching, in 1977, when Debby Boone sang `You Light Up My Life’ backed by a chorus of 11 children from the John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf interpreting the lyric in sign language. It was even more poignant when it subsequently emerged that they were just regular Equity kids pretending to be deaf and that the signing was complete gibberish. Ah, happy days. For next year’s Oscars, I intend to turn the sound down and sign it myself.
But for those who want the “highlights” this year, without watching the entire 27-hour craptacular experience on TV, John Nolte, majordomo of Big Hollywood will be tweeting and live blogging, as will Hot Air. At the New Ledger, Mike Tunison, the co-founder of the often very funny Kissing Suzy Kolber sports blog, among numerous other projects, will be liveblogging as well.
President Obama, we urge you to take this polite and enterprising multimedia artist up on his offer. Just think what he would do to improve relations with the Senate!
To understand how ancient a meme this is (particularly coming from a guy who has a made a career of futuristic-looking movies), allow me to quote liberally from a post I wrote in late November, right after Climategate first broke:
Found via Sissy Willis, back in 2004, Thomas Sowell was interviewed by the American Enterprise Institute:
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
A couple of years later, Julia Gorin made an acute observation that during the mid-aughts, global warming served as a Freudian displacement for a left that turned their backs on the Global War on Terror:
It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming – at least that’s what some would have us believe.
Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. “I really consider this a national security issue,” says celebrity activist and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David. “Truth” star Al Gore calls global warming a “planetary emergency.” Bill Clinton’s first worry is climate change: “It’s the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it.”
Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you.
What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization … That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They’re not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they’re still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it’s all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that’s what I’m getting at.
At least at the moment, it’s the good guys that are winning, likely much to Time’s chagrin.
Click over to Big Hollywood for the video of Cameron in action, in which he says he’s attempting to “raise awareness” of global warming — good thing too, as so few people have heard about it! Hollywood in particular has really fallen down on the job here, particularly in the last decade.
John adds:
How much carbon did the Malibu Mansion-dwelling director emit to create and promote ”Avatar?”
If Cameron and all the other elitists who so casually spew this socialism-disguised-as-nonsense enviro stuff really believed Global Warming was a dire threat, they would behave accordingly with respect to their own jet-set lifestyles and carbon-spewing professions.
I don’t believe in Global Warming because — well, because I have a brain — but mainly because the James Camerons and the Al Gores of the world don’t believe in it, either. They get rich off of it. They puff their insecure selves up with it. They feel a sense of superiority over it…
But they don’t believe in it.
Look how the “experts” live.
Or they really do believe Global Warming is as dire a threat as WWII, which means their lifestyle is a weapon of genocide.
Not to mention their industry, which relies on enormous quantities of electricity, chemicals, computer equipment, artificial lighting, vehicles, and aircraft to function. What happens when some crazed lefty takes up Cameron’s earlier, equally silly cry that “I believe in ecoterrorism,” and smashes the equipment on a film set or location shoot?
And speaking of Cameron and techno-sophistry, at Instapundit.com, computer guru Ray Kurzweil reviews Avatar and notes:
The Na’vi were not completely technology-free. They basically used the type of technology that Native Americans used hundreds of years ago – same clothing, domesticated animals, natural medicine, and bows and arrows.
They were in fact exactly like Native Americans. How likely is that? Life on this distant moon in another star system has evolved creatures that look essentially the same as earthly creatures, with very minor differences (dogs, horses, birds, rhinoceros-like animals, and so on), not to mention humanoids that are virtually the same as humans here on Earth. That’s quite a coincidence.
Cameron’s conception of technology a hundred years from now was incredibly unimaginative, even by Hollywood standards. For example, the munitions that were supposed to blow up the tree of life looked like they were used in World War II (maybe even World War I). Most of the technology looked primitive, even by today’s standards. The wearable exoskeleton robotic devices were supposed to be futuristic, but these already exist, and are beginning to be deployed. The one advanced technology was the avatar technology itself. But in that sense, Avatar is like the world of the movie AI, where they had human-level cyborgs, but nothing else had changed: AI featured 1980’s cars and coffee makers. As for Avatar, are people still going to use computer screens in a hundred years? Are they going to drive vehicles?
I thought the story and script was unimaginative, one-dimensional, and derivative. The basic theme was “evil corporation rapes noble natives.” And while that is a valid theme, it was done without the least bit of subtlety, complexity, or human ambiguity. The basic story was taken right from Dances with Wolves. And how many (thousands of) times have we seen a final battle scene that comes down to a battle between the hero and the anti-hero that goes through various incredible stages — fighting on a flying airplane, in the trees, on the ground, etc? And (spoiler alert) how predictable was it that the heroine would pull herself free at the last second and save the day?
None of the creatures were especially creative. The flying battles were like Harry Potter’s Quidditch, and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures. There was some concept of networked intelligence but it was not especially coherent. The philosophy was the basic Hollywood religion about the noble cycle of life.
The movie was fundamentally anti-technology. Yes, it is true, as I pointed out above, that the natives use tools, but these are not the tools we associate with modern technology. And it is true that the Sigourney Weaver character and her band of scientists intend to help the Na’vi with their human technology (much like international aid workers might do today in developing nations), but we never actually see that happen. I got the sense that Cameron was loath to show modern technology doing anything useful.
Well, other than technology’s ability to create a zillion dollar motion picture that’s printing money for himself and 20th Century Fox. Hollywood’s elites are anti-technology in their heart of hearts, and yet use enormous quantities of it to further their bottom line. Too bad they don’t grant such a distinction to the rest of us.
(Update: Speaking of Big Hollywood, thanks for linking to this post.)
In an interview exclusive to this week’s show, Ed Driscoll talks with Ed Morrissey of Hot Air.com. By the middle of the preceding decade, global warming become the left’s “moral equivalent” of the War on Terror. Concurrently, the legacy media kicked itself endlessly for not being skeptical enough regarding the faulty intelligence during the period that preceded the Iraq War. (The post-Clinton period, at least.) Captain Ed wonders why they now appear as if they’re completely ignoring the faulty intelligence that led to Climategate.
A brief snippet from Bill Whittle’s PJTV interview with Lord Christopher Monckton, who’s been challenging Al Gore for a face-to-face debate on global warming for years. Watch the entire segment here.
Produced by your humble Blogospheric narrator, and creator of very silly Brandocons…
Great moments in intraparty rivalries: Then: Ronald Reagan’s “I’m paying for this microphone” soundbite, which helped him to best fellow Republican George H.W. Bush and ultimately win the presidency in 1980.
Now: J.D. Hayworth photoshops an image of John McCain into the Na’vi from James Cameron’s Avatar. Or as Allahpundit writes, “And so it came to be that the hottest Senate primary in the country devolved into an argument over what is and isn’t insulting to an indigenous culture that doesn’t actually exist. Except in America’s hearts.”
As Kyle Smith writes, “Now that Michael Moore has segued into denouncing capitalism in general and Democrats in particular, the media have more or less lost interest in him:”
Promoting his new DVD, he’s forced to radio interviews on Sirius. He denounces Democrats as wimps and wussies and says Van Jones should have simply replied, “F— off” when it was revealed that he had been a Communist. It didn’t quite work that way with Van, did it? Van could say whatever he wanted — it was Obama who fired him. So it’s Obama who should have said, “F— off.” Sure. We all want a president like that. Moore also says he’s been warning us for 20 years that GM was a lousy company that was going to slide downhill and take all of us with it. Huh? What Moore has actually been arguing for 20 years is that all companies but especially GM should give in to union demands — which GM did indeed do, though not to the degree Moore called for, and which bankrupted the company.Moore has been rendered almost completely irrelevant by the Democratic takeover. He’s never going to say things are going great, is he? But liberal denouncing fellow liberals doesn’t work for the media. He’d be much better off if Republicans were still in power. After years of being showered with Oscar glory and huge spreads in the New York Times, he’s returning to his natural position as an extremist with a smallish following.
As Healy notes, “I think by the end of FDR’s 12 years, you see something that looks like reality imitating fiction in some ways. This view of the president as akin to a national guardian angel really becomes deeply embedded in the national consciousness.”
When Newsweek declared “We’re All Socialists Now” and Evan Thomas claimed, “in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God”, these were the sorts of images that were rifling through their minds during the first half of last year. As Bill Kristol recently noted, everyone should be very grateful that Obama’s perch is not quite as lofty six months later, though, like the chraracter portrayed by Walter Huston in the video above, there’s still plenty more damage he can and likely will inflict upon the nation.
It’s asked by a nationally famous newspaper columnist, author, screenplay writer, and former TV co-host who turned into Twitter’s equivalent of Mr. Wilson from Denace the Menace, because he hates every policy the GOP stands for, real and imagined.
Update: In the comments below, an excellent suggestion: “He should ask George Soros that question.” Or John Kerry and Teresa Heinz, John Edwards, Pinch Sulzberger, Thomas Friedman, Al Gore, Warren Buffett, Warren Beatty, Mark Cuban…
Barber’s piece was introduced to a whole new generation of listeners via its use as the opening music for 1986’s Platoon, but some of the tonalities in this arrangement very much remind me of the opening of “Vessels”, the choral piece that Philip Glass composed for 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi.
Of course, the ultimate use of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” remains as the score for this almost equally violent — albeit infinitely tastier — production:
