Re: Hollywood Takes on the Left
Eric Gisin
The dont' use fake names when mocking Al Gore or Mikey Moore.
Check out IMDB's page for An American Carol: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190617/
"Joe Gillis" <Floating...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:f7b97240-de26-49ea...@2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com...
Hollywood Takes on the Left
David Zucker, the director who brought us 'Airplane!' and 'The Naked
Gun,' turns his sights on anti-Americanism.
by Stephen F. Hayes - 08/11/2008, Volume 013, Issue 45
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/385rlkfy.asp
Los Angeles
For anyone who has ever been on a movie set, the commotion inside
Warner Brothers Studio 15 will be familiar: serious-faced actors and
actresses quietly rehearsing their lines; the director of photography
huddled with his assistants around two high-definition screens inside
a small black tent reviewing the last scenes; extras lounging around
the set trying both to stay out of the way and to get noticed;
carpenters busily working to construct the set for the next scene; a
frazzled first assistant director guzzling Red Bull and yelling
instructions to anyone who will listen.
"Rolling," he shouts.
Others throughout the cavernous studio echo his call.
"Rolling! Quiet please!"
David Zucker is sitting in a high-backed director's chair with his
name on it. (I'd always assumed they were just used for effect in
movies, but here one was.) Zucker is looking at a monitor showing the
inside of an empty New York City subway station. It's actually just a
set--a stunning replica of a subway station--and it sits 15 feet to
Zucker's right.
The first assistant director breaks the silence.
"Action!"
The set jumps to life. Two young men--both terrorists--enter the
station. They are surprised to see a security checkpoint manned by two
NYPD officers. "I'll need to see your bag, please," says one of the
officers. The lead terrorist glances nervously at his friend and
swings his backpack down from his shoulder to present it to the cops.
Just as the officer pulls on the zipper, however, a small army of ACLU
lawyers marches up to the policemen with a stop-search order. The cops
look at each other and shrug their shoulders. "This says we can't
search their bags."
The young men are relieved. They smile fiendishly as they walk toward
the crowded platform. As the lead terrorist once again slips the
backpack over his shoulder, he mutters his appreciation.
"Thank Allah for the ACLU."
Zucker's latest movie, An American Carol, is unlike anything that has
ever come out of Hollywood. It is a frontal attack on the excesses of
the American left from several prominent members of a growing class of
Hollywood conservatives. Until now, conservatives in Hollywood have
always been too few and too worried about a backlash to do anything
serious to challenge the left-wing status quo.
David Zucker believes we are in a "new McCarthy era." Time magazine
film writer Richard Corliss recently joked that conservative films are
"almost illegal in Hollywood." Tom O'Malley, president of Vivendi
Entertainment, though, dismisses claims that Hollywood is hostile to
conservative ideas and suggests that conservatives simply haven't been
as interested in making movies. "How come there aren't more socialists
on Wall Street?"
But Zucker's film, together with a spike in attendance at events put
on by "The Friends of Abe" (Lincoln, not Vigoda)--a group of right-
leaning Hollywood types that has been meeting regularly for the past
four years--is once again reviving hope that conservatives will have a
battalion in this exceedingly influential battleground of the broader
culture war.
Zucker has always been interested in politics. He was raised in
Shorewood, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, in a household where
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was viewed as either a hero or a dangerous
conservative. He was elected president of his senior class at the
University of Wisconsin, and, when he addressed his classmates at
commencement in the spring of 1970, his speech was serious--a friend
describes it as "solemn" and political. Among other things, Zucker
condemned the Kent State shootings and lamented the mistreatment of
America's blacks. Two years later, he appeared on stage with lefty
leading man Warren Beatty and Democratic presidential candidate George
McGovern. Zucker says at the time he was "very liberal." (His brother
Jerry remains an unreconstructed liberal and recently optioned a
sympathetic movie about the life and times of serial fabulist Joe
Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame.)
David Zucker got his start in entertainment right after school. In
1971, he teamed up with his brother and two friends to create an
irreverent revue called Kentucky Fried Theater. They drew large crowds
to cafés and small theaters in Madison and soon outgrew the college
town. They went to Hollywood to chase the dream, and, surprise, the
show worked in Southern California, too.
They caught the attention of some of Hollywood's boldfaced names--the
show would serve as one of Lorne Michaels's inspirations for Saturday
Night Live--and in 1977 they released their first film, The Kentucky
Fried Movie. It was the first of many classics: Airplane!, Top
Secret!, The Naked Gun, BASEketball. Actually, BASEketball sucked, but
by the time it was released in 1998, Zucker had put together enough of
a streak that he was widely regarded as a comedic genius. Matt Stone,
who together with Trey Parker created South Park, starred in
BASEketball. He described Zucker's influence this way: "I used to sit
at home with my friends in high school and watch Kentucky Fried Movie
and Airplane! and vomit from laughing."
Although these films had some political jokes, the movies themselves
did not carry overt political messages. Naked Gun 2 came closest with
a vaguely pro-environment theme. (It opens with George H.W. Bush
meeting with the heads of America's coal, oil, and nuclear industries:
the representatives of the Society for More Coal Energy [pronounced
SMOKE]; the Society of Petroleum Industry Leaders [SPIL]; and the Key
Atomic Benefits Office of Mankind [KABOOM].) Zucker, who owns a Toyota
Prius and derives a third of the energy for his house from
photovoltaic cells, is still an environmentalist.
In 1984, one of Zucker's college friends, Rich Markey, suggested he
listen to a local Los Angeles talk radio show, "Religion on the Line,"
hosted by Dennis Prager. Zucker took the advice and soon struck up a
friendship with Prager, whose conservative views appealed to Zucker as
common sense. Although his politics were evolving, Zucker remained
supportive of California Democrats, giving $2,400 to Senator Barbara
Boxer in the mid-1990s. He contributed another $600 to an outfit
called the "Hollywood Women's Political Committee" which, with members
like Jane Fonda, Bonnie Raitt, and Barbra Streisand, probably wasn't
calling for low taxes and abstinence education.
Zucker was still nominally a Democrat when George W. Bush was elected
in 2000. "Then 9/11 happened, and I couldn't take it anymore," he
says. "The response to 9/11--the right was saying this is pure evil
we're facing and the left was saying how are we at fault for this? I
think I'd just had enough. And I said 'I quit.'"
He decided to write a letter to Boxer, sharing his disgust and telling
her not to expect any more of his money. Having never done this
before, he asked a friend with the Republican Jewish Committee for
help. This friend recommended Zucker contact Myrna Sokoloff, a former
paid staffer for Boxer, who had recently completed a similar
ideological journey.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Sokoloff had worked for several stars of the
Democratic party's left wing. She served on the campaign staff of Mark
Green, a close associate of Ralph Nader, when he ran for Senate in New
York against Al D'Amato. She worked for Jerry Brown's 1992
presidential campaign and in 1998 was a fundraiser for Barbara Boxer's
reelection effort.
Sokoloff had begun to sour on the Democratic party and the left
generally during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. "As a feminist, I
was outraged," she recalls. "If he had been a Republican president we
would have demanded his resignation and marched on the White House."
When she made this point to her Democratic friends, she says, they
told her to keep quiet.
Although she didn't vote for George W. Bush in 2000, Sokoloff says she
was glad that he won. Less than a year later, she understood why.
"When 9/11 happened, I knew Democrats wouldn't be strong enough to
fight this war."
Sokoloff and Zucker never did write the letter to Boxer, but their
partnership would prove much more fruitful.
As the 2004 presidential election approached, Sokoloff and Zucker
looked for a way to influence the debate. Their first effort was an ad
mocking John Kerry for his flip-flops that the conservative Club for
Growth paid to put on the air. In 2006, Sokoloff and Zucker followed
that with a series of uproarious short spots mocking, in turn, the
Iraq Study Group, Madeleine Albright and pro-appeasement foreign
policy, and pro-tax congressional Democrats.
The Iraq Study Group ad was the most memorable. It opens with news
footage of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain celebrating the
signing of the Munich Agreement. A newspaper stand boasting "Peace
with Honour" flashes across the screen.
Neville Chamberlain: "This morning, I had another talk with the German
Chancellor, Herr Hitler. Here is the paper, which bears his name upon
it, as well as mine."
The spot cuts to footage of German bombers over Warsaw. "Well,"
intones a narrator, "that negotiation went well. Fifty million dead
worldwide. Nicely done, Mr. Chamberlain."
Then viewers are shown footage of imaginary negotiations between James
Baker, Syria's Bashar Assad, and "Iranian madman" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Baker's Iraq Study Group had formally recommended talks with Iran and
Syria as part of its proposed solution to the problems in Iraq.
When Ahmadinejad asks Baker for permission to develop nuclear weapons
so long as Iran promises not to use them, Baker agrees. Triumphant
music plays loudly in the background and the diplomacy pauses for a
celebration and some photos.
The music stops and Baker returns to the table with Ahmadinejad and
Syria's Bashar Assad.
"Next item: You must agree to stop supplying the explosive devices
that are killing our American soldiers in Iraq," Baker insists.
"We won't do that."
"Well, can you reduce the number?"
"Okay, how about 10 percent?" Assad proposes.
"Twenty percent," Baker responds.
"Fifteen."
"Five."
"Sold!"
The music starts again and Baker, like Chamberlain, triumphantly waves
the signed agreement.
"Now, this thing about destroying Israel," he says to Ahmadinejad.
"We will do that," says the Iranian leader.
Baker shrugs. "That's fair," he says, affixing his signature to yet
another agreement and once again waving it before the cameras.
Zucker says that the idea to do a feature film grew out of those ads,
and several of the actors in the spots, including Turkish actor Serdar
Kalsin, who plays Ahmadinejad, have speaking roles in the film.
If An American Carol grew out of Zucker's work on these commercials,
the narrative device dates back to 1843. An American Carol is based
loosely--very loosely--on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
"Why be original?" Zucker asks. "I've done that. It doesn't work, like
BASEketball"--as he says this, he rolls his eyes and moves his right
hand across his body to indicate a car going off a cliff.
The holiday in An American Carol is not Christmas and the antagonist
is not Ebenezer Scrooge. Instead, the film follows the exploits of a
slovenly, anti-American filmmaker named Michael Malone, who has joined
with a left-wing activist group (Moovealong.org) to ban the Fourth of
July. Along the way, Malone is visited by the ghosts of three American
heroes--George Washington, George S. Patton, and John F. Kennedy--who
try to convince him he's got it all wrong. When terrorists from
Afghanistan realize that they need to recruit more operatives to make
up for the ever-diminishing supply of suicide bombers, they begin a
search for just the right person to help produce a new propaganda
video. "This will not be hard to find in Hollywood," says one. "They
all hate America." When they settle on Malone, who is in need of work
after his last film (Die You American Pigs) bombed at the box office,
he unwittingly helps them with their plans to launch another attack on
American soil.
The entire film is an extended rebuttal to the vacuous antiwar slogan
that "War Is Not the Answer." Zucker's response, in effect: "It
Depends on the Question."
Zucker had originally hoped to cast Dan Whitney (aka Larry the Cable
Guy) as Malone, but a timing conflict kept him from getting it done.
After briefly considering Frank Caliendo, a fellow Wisconsinite, a
colleague passed him a reel from Kevin Farley, the younger brother of
the late Chris Farley, and Zucker, who recalled seeing Kevin Farley in
an episode of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, was interested.
Zucker and Sokoloff met Farley in April 2007. Zucker described his new
film with words he had chosen carefully. "I figured he was like
everyone else in Hollywood--a Democrat," Zucker recalls. "And we knew
that this was not a Democrat movie." It would be a satirical look at
the war on terror, he told Farley, and explained that he and Sokoloff
were political "moderates."
Farley hadn't seen any of Zucker's ads and assumed he was like
everyone else in Hollywood--a Democrat. So he answered with some
strategic ambiguity of his own. "I consider myself a centrist," he
said, worried that they might press him more about his political
views.
Zucker gave Farley the script and, concerned that Farley's agent would
advise him against accepting the role because of the film's politics,
told the actor not to show it to anyone. Farley, best known for his
recurring role in a series of Hertz commercials, read the script and
called back the next day to accept.
When he met Zucker and Sokoloff on the set as shooting on the film
began, he told them that he, too, had long considered himself a
conservative. "I couldn't believe it," says Sokoloff. "We were afraid
that he would not want to be involved in something that was so
directly taking on the left and that he would not want to play the
Michael Moore character."
Farley told me this story during a break in filming at the Daniel
Webster Elementary School in Pasadena, last April, with Steve
McEveety, the film's producer, listening in.
"I thought that the minute we started talking about politics that
would be the end," Farley recalls. "There was this dance that we did--
a dance familiar to conservative actors in Hollywood. Lots of actors
have done it."
"All three of you," said McEveety.
"Yeah, all three of us."
Farley is not aggressive about his politics and has chosen simply to
opt out of political discussions when they have arisen on other
projects. "I usually just bite my tongue unless it gets too
ridiculous," he says. "The only thing that really bothers me is when
they go off about the president. It just gets annoying."
If Farley is nervous that his proverbial big break is coming in a film
with politics that might make getting his next big role more
difficult, he doesn't show it. "If it's the last movie I do, I'll go
work for Steve's company," he says.
"If this doesn't work," McEveety deadpans, "I won't have a company."
Yes, he will. He founded the company, Mpower Pictures, two years ago
with John Shepherd, a former child actor, and Todd Burns, who helped
put himself through law school by working as an EMT. McEveety, whose
producing credits include Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, and The
Passion of the Christ, is far too well-established to live or die
based on the success of one film. And he created Mpower in part
because he wanted the freedom to take risks on film projects others in
Hollywood wouldn't consider. One such film, The Fallen, will be out
later this fall. The film, based on a powerful book by Iranian
journalist Friedoune Sahebjam, tells the true story of a young Iranian
woman who is framed by her husband on false charges of infidelity and
persecuted under the strictures of sharia law. According to McEveety,
the Iranian regime has already begun an effort to discredit the film.
McEveety is one of several big names that will make it hard for the
Hollywood establishment to ignore An American Carol. Jon Voight plays
George Washington. Dennis Hopper makes an appearance as a judge who
defends his courthouse by gunning down ACLU lawyers trying to take
down the Ten Commandments. James Woods plays Michael Malone's agent.
And Kelsey Grammer plays General George S. Patton, Malone's guide to
American history and the mouthpiece of the film's writers.
I chatted with Grammer on the set at Warner Brothers studios. "I'm
glad some of the bigger guys jumped in--Dennis Hopper, Jon Voight,
James Woods."
Grammer has been out as a conservative for several years and has
publicly mused about running for office. His name comes up
periodically when California Republicans are brainstorming about
candidates to take on Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein for their
Senate seats. It's not hard to see why. He is passionate about the
issues that matter most to conservatives and extraordinarily
articulate.
"The accepted way to speak about America is in the voice that
disrespects it. And the voice that's unacceptable is the one that
loves America," he says, wearing the uniform of an Army general and
sipping from a bottle of pomegranate juice. "How did we get here?"
Over the course of two hours, we are joined by several others working
on the movie and talk about everything from taxes--"the rich in this
country are being criminalized"--to Iraq. "Petraeus has to couch every
bit of optimism in some convoluted formulation to avoid the promised
rush of disrespect," Grammer says.
Eventually, the conversation turns from policy to punditry. Grammer,
who is friends with Ann Coulter, says he quoted her once to some of
the young people who work for him.
"'Ann Coulter,'" he says, recalling their horror and assuming their
voice. "'She's the antichrist.' And I said: 'What the f-- do you know
about the antichrist? You don't even believe in Christ.'"
Robert Davi, who plays the lead terrorist in the Zucker film, joins us
as the discussion turns from policy to the cable pundit shows. Davi is
one of those actors with an instantly recognizable face--he was the
villain in the Bond film Licence to Kill--but whose name is unknown to
most of the country.
"I can't stand Keith Olbermann," says Davi. "Jesus Christ, I want to
slap that guy."
"I just sit there and watch these shows"--he picks up an imaginary
remote from the table in front of him, points it at the imaginary
television somewhere to the right of my head and begins clicking--"I
watch them all. I cannot watch the murder shows anymore. Greta comes
on and"--he changes the channel once more.
Our discussion continues over lunch and we are joined by Myrna
Sokoloff, Kevin Farley, and Chriss Anglin, who plays JFK. Lunch lasts
an hour, and we discuss marginal tax rates, the Democratic primary,
whether John McCain will pick Condoleezza Rice as his running mate,
the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, and whether the talk of closing
Guantánamo is serious or just campaign rhetoric.
Eventually, the conversation turns to the war and the opposition to
it--the subject of their current project. "No one on the left wants to
admit that radical Islamists want to kill Americans, the Jews--
everyone in the West," Davi says. "I try to talk to my friends on the
left and they just don't get it. Most of them have never even heard of
Sayyid Qutb. How can you have an intellectual discussion about the war
we're in without knowing who Sayyid Qutb is?" he asks, raising his
voice so that actors from other tables glance over to see what's
causing the commotion. JFK concentrates on his food.
Later that same day, I spoke to Lee Reynolds, who plays the New York
police officer whose efforts to search the terrorists are thwarted by
the ACLU. Reynolds, too, is a conservative--something David Zucker did
not know when he cast Reynolds in the anti-Kerry ad he produced in
2004. Reynolds was active duty military for 12 years and shortly after
9/11 worked as the chief media officer for detainee operations at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
When he returned, he took a job as a production assistant on a film--
he asked me not to name it--shot in several locations across the
United States. Reynolds worked hard and, he says, won the confidence
of the film's directors, who gave him more responsibility. But just as
he was making a name for himself, word began to spread that he had
been in the military and, far worse, that he supported the efforts of
his uniformed colleagues in the war on terror.
"Once they found out I was a Republican, unfortunately for some people
it was a problem," he recalls. Several people who had talked to him
regularly throughout the shoot simply stopped. And a trip that he was
to have taken to participate in an offsite shoot across the country
was abruptly cancelled. Another person was sent in his place. Reynolds
says that he had only two colleagues who treated him the same way they
had before, including "an anti-Bush lesbian" who was disgusted by the
dogmatism of the others on the film. Reynolds, now a reservist, is
scheduled to leave for Iraq in early 2009. The more Zucker is known as
a conservative, the more frequently he has encounters with others who
consider themselves conservative.
On one of the days I was on set, McEveety had invited Vivendi
Entertainment president Tom O'Malley to meet Zucker. Vivendi had just
agreed to distribute the film and had promised wide release--news that
had the cast and crew of An American Carol in particularly good
spirits.
O'Malley and Zucker chatted about the fact that O'Malley is the nephew
of Candid Camera's Tom O'Malley and that they are both from the
Midwest, among other things. Zucker thanked him for picking up the
movie, which will be one of the first for Vivendi's new distribution
arm. O'Malley told Zucker that he was particularly interested in this
film in part because he, too, leans right.
Such revelations are common occurrences at the periodic meetings of
the secret society of Hollywood conservatives known as the "Friends of
Abe." The group, with no official membership list and no formal
mission, has been meeting under the leadership of Gary Sinise (CSI New
York, Forrest Gump) for four years. Zucker had spent a year working on
a film with Christopher McDonald without learning anything about his
politics. Shortly after the film wrapped, he ran into McDonald, best
known as Shooter McGavin from Adam Sandler's Happy Gilmore, at one of
these informal meetings.
"It's almost like people who are gay, show up at the baths and say,
'Oh, I didn't know you were gay!' " Zucker says.
From the beginning, Zucker knew what the political message of An
American Carol would be. His problem was how to make it funny.
The war on terror, of course, does not lend itself to hilarity. But
Zucker knows comedy and has spent nearly four decades making people
laugh. With his friend Lewis Friedman, a comedy writer, Zucker went
looking for the absurd in the political left and found an abundance of
material.
Zucker and Friedman poked fun of the know-nothing culture of antiwar
protests. During a rally at Columbia University, students chant:
"Peace Now, We Don't Care How!" Some of their protest signs are ones
you'd find at any antiwar rally. Some are not. "9/11 Was an Inside
Job," "Kick Army Recruiters Off Campus!" "End Violence--War Is Not the
Answer!" "End Disease--Medicine Is Not the Answer!" "It's Too Dark
Outside, The Sun Is Not the Answer!" "Overpopulation--Gay Marriage Is
the Answer!"
Other claims were so absurd they didn't require exaggeration. "We
really didn't have to do a lot of stretching," says Zucker.
When he heard Rosie O'Donnell claim that "radical Christianity is just
as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we
have a separation of church and state," he knew he had several minutes
of material.
In the film, a rotund comedian named Rosie O'Connell makes an
appearance on The O'Reilly Factor to promote her documentary, The
Truth About Radical Christians. O'Reilly shows a clip, which opens
with a pair of priests walking through an airport--as seen from pre-
hijacking surveillance video--before boarding the airplane. Once
onboard, they storm the cockpit using crucifixes as their weapon of
choice. Next the documentary looks at the growing phenomenon of nuns
as suicide bombers, seeking 72 virgins in heaven. A dramatization
shows two nuns, strapped with explosives, board a bus to the cries of
the other passengers. "Oh, no! Not the Christians!" O'Connell's work
ends with a warning about new threats and the particular menace of the
"Episcopal suppository bomber."
Zucker is plainly not worried about offending anyone. David Alan Grier
plays a slave in a scene designed to show Malone what might have
happened if the United States had not fought the Civil War. As Patton
explains to a dumbfounded Malone that the plantation they are visiting
is his own, Grier thanks the documentarian for being such a humane
owner. As they leave, another slave, played by Gary Coleman, finishes
polishing a car and yells "Hey, Barack!" before tossing the sponge to
someone off-camera.
It is one of just two references to the ongoing presidential campaign.
(The other one, more cryptic, comes in a scene that's a throwback to
the Iraq Study Group ad. Neville Chamberlain, after polishing Adolf
Hitler's boots, signs the Munich Agreement, and declares: "We have
hope now.") But Tom O'Malley, president of Vivendi, believes that the
timing of the film's release--October 3--will give it special
relevance to the current debates. And several of the film's leading
figures have strong opinions about Barack Obama. "Obama is not
qualified to be president, and it'll be a disaster," says Zucker, who
then pauses as if he's said something he should have kept to himself.
"Shouldn't I be allowed to say that?"
Zucker says that one of the major differences between the left and the
right in America today is that leftists think of their political
opponents as evil. "I don't think that Obama is an evil guy, I just
think he's wrong. But I do think we face real evil in Ahmadinejad and
the mullahs and all these crazy guys."
Does Obama understand that?
"I don't think so. I don't think so."
Zucker points to a National Journal study that found Obama to be the
most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. "John Kerry was, and Obama is.
Fortunately, Kerry was a stiff. But Obama isn't a stiff and he's
really adaptable. He's like a really clever virus who adapts. Obama's
the farthest left of all of these guys. And that's why he associated
with all of those crazies--terrorists, preachers of hate."
Jon Voight, who says he was "duped" as a young man into rallying
against the Vietnam war, is also troubled both by Obama's associations
and his willingness to end them so abruptly. "When I look at the other
side, when I look at Barack Obama, I see expediency," he says,
pointing to Obama's relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright,
and assuming Obama's voice. "He's like family. I could never disown
him. I didn't know him. I didn't hear those words in that church."
If those behind the film have similar views about Obama, many of them
have opposing views about the long-term impact of a film like An
American Carol on the movie industry.
"If this does well, it'll change everything," says Grammer.
"I think it would be pompous to say that," says Voight. "It's a movie.
It's a satire. And it's a funny satire. I don't want to point to this
thing, just because there are so few films from conservative sources,
and make it a target. It's a movie. Let's not burden this little horse
with additional weights."
David Zucker seems to be of two minds. When I ask him if he had an
objective in making the film, he borrows a line from his friend and
former partner, Jim Abrahams. "Avoid embarrassment."
He adds: "I don't have any desire to be taken seriously. Really, I
really don't. But having said that, I really believe this stuff. Why
can't I put it out there? And I'm scared to death of Obama. If I
didn't do something about it I would feel--My kids would ask: 'What
did you do in the war Daddy?'"
"I donated my career to stop this s--."
Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the
author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and
Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins) .
Charles & Mambo Duckman
> I doubt it will be as good as Team America or South Park.
> The dont' use fake names when mocking Al Gore or Mikey Moore.
> Check out IMDB's page for An American Carol:
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190617/
>
> "Joe Gillis" <Floating...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:f7b97240-de26-49ea...@2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com...
>
> Hollywood Takes on the Left
Stupidest shit I've read in quite a while.
--
Come down off the cross
We can use the wood
Tom Waits, Come On Up To The House
Eric Gisin
news:uJ6dnYfLAIz9DwbV...@comcast.com...
> Eric Gisin wrote:
>> I doubt it will be as good as Team America or South Park.
Forget to mention, get the R-rated version. Puppet sex is really funny.
>> The dont' use fake names when mocking Al Gore or Mikey Moore.
>> Check out IMDB's page for An American Carol: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190617/
>>
>> "Joe Gillis" <Floating...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:f7b97240-de26-49ea...@2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> Hollywood Takes on the Left
>
>
> Stupidest shit I've read in quite a while.
>
I bet you think Mikey Moron is a documentary genius, then.
Antonio E. Gonzalez
<duc...@gfy.slf> wrote:
>Eric Gisin wrote:
>> I doubt it will be as good as Team America or South Park.
>> The dont' use fake names when mocking Al Gore or Mikey Moore.
>> Check out IMDB's page for An American Carol:
>> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190617/
>>
>> "Joe Gillis" <Floating...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:f7b97240-de26-49ea...@2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> Hollywood Takes on the Left
>
>
>Stupidest shit I've read in quite a while.
Airplane! is my favorite movie since my childhood, yet Zucker
seems either misinfomred, or just wilfully ignorant; even included
that "Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate" myth.
According to the American Conservative Union, there are 19 Senators
with a more liberal voting record than Obama for 2007, and 30 if
lifetime record is counted . . .:
<http://www.acuratings.org/2007senate.htm>
This seems to explain the ideology behind this movie . . .:
<http://www.idrewthis.org/2008/10/fear-and-loathing.html>
"You see a lot of false equivalencies in the media. It's sort of their
creed: if you report that Republicans have done something that makes
them look bad, you must immediately find a way to say that Democrats
do it also. That is how you seem "fair." If the Republicans are, for
instance, lying through their teeth, and the Democrats aren't, you're
obligated to say something like "Republicans are claiming that Ted
Kennedy is a serial killer, but Democrats today used a very generous
interpretation of their tax plan, so both sides lie."
For instance, on ABC's "this week," Paul Krugman (who is brilliant)
and Cokie Roberts (who is a complete tool) had the following exchange:
Krugman: This is not just about McCain and what he did. The fact
of the matter is, for a long time we have had a substantial fraction
of the Republican base that just does not regard the idea of Democrats
governing as legitimate. Remember the Clinton years. It was craziness,
right? They were murderers, they were drug smugglers, and the imminent
prospect of what looks like a big Democratic victory would drive a lot
of these people crazy even if Sarah Palin wasn't saying these
inflammatory things. It's going to be very ugly after the election.
Roberts: On both sides that's true. I think that you've also had a
huge number of Democrats who think that the Republicans are
illegitimate, and that was particularly true after the 2000 election,
and to some degree after 2004. And so you really do have at the core
of each party people who are not ready to accept the verdict of the
election.
Krugman: I reject the equivalence.
Jeez.
I'm just going to quote Hilzoy's response in full, because it's better
than I could put it:
I do too, on two counts. First, there is no analogy between 1992
and 2000. In 1992, there was no question that Bill Clinton won the
election. He had 370 electoral votes to Bush's 168. He got 5.6% more
of the popular vote than Bush. It was not close.
In 2000, by contrast, Gore won the popular vote, and the electoral
vote turned on Florida, whose results in turn were decided by the
Supreme Court. And the decision in Bush v. Gore was very hard to
explain as a principled decision: justices in the majority not only
abandoned long-held positions on federalism, but announced that their
decision should not be cited as a precedent in future cases. I really
do not want to re-argue the 2000 election. But I think that the idea
that there's some sort of equivalence between doubting the fairness of
the 2000 and 1992 elections is absurd.
Second, while a lot of Democrats had deep concerns about the
outcome of Bush v. Gore, the overwhelming majority of us accepted that
the courts had the right to adjudicate questions of law. As a result,
most of us accepted the idea that whether or not George W. Bush had
actually won the election in straightforward common-sense terms, he
was entitled under the law to be our President.
Or, in short: we had a lot more reason to regard George W. Bush as
illegitimate than the Republicans had to regard Clinton as
illegitimate. Despite that fact, most of us accepted the fact that,
like it or not, he was our President. We did not go around claiming
that he had killed one of his closest associates, or was a drug
smuggler, or hung crack pipes from his Christmas tree.
There is no equivalency here. None at all.
Maybe next week I'll take on the (cough) challenging task of
explaining why there is no equivalence between saying that Clinton was
a murderer and saying that George W. Bush is a war criminal. Hint:
it's the same reason there would be no equivalence between saying that
Bush held up a convenience store and saying that Clinton was
unfaithful to his wife.
Amen.
I want to add, though, that this seems, to me, to point out a distinct
difference between the Democratic base and the Republican base.
I think, for the most part, we see politics as the clash of competing
ideas. Which is why a lot of alleged Democrats and liberals were
willing to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt for
so long. Those of us on the "angry left" (the "dirty fucking hippies"
to use Atrios's phrase) were left helplessly pointing out that Bush
was lying us into war, that his administration was staffed with
incompetent cronies, that his proposed social security policies were
presented dishonestly and were actually a big gift to Wall Street at
the expense of the least among us. Eventually, more and more people
came around to our view, because it got really hard to avoid--Bush and
his minions didn't just represent an alternate set of proposals we
could battle honestly, they represented something much more insidious,
dishonest, and destructive.
People who reached this conclusion did so almost entirely on policy
grounds. Bush's policies, and their results, just got so hateful and
disastrous that open-minded people could no longer ignore it, which is
why Bush's approval ratings are now dipping to sub-Nixonian levels.
In short, it wasn't that we hate him and therefore we look for reasons
to justify that hate. For the most part, we started out giving him the
benefit of the doubt and found that his actions left hating him as the
only honest option.
Contrast that to the way conservatives, even allegedly "mainstream"
ones, treated Bill Clinton. From the very, very beginning, they
accused him of having murdered Vince Foster, of being a drug smuggler,
of operating death squads in Arkansas to whack his political enemies,
of somehow having committed impeachable offenses in a 1974 Arkansas
land deal on which he lost money. They hated him with a passion that
bordered on psychosis.
And it clearly wasn't that they hated him because of his policies, or
even because they'd heard that he was a murderer or a rapist or a drug
smuggler. They hated him because he was THE ENEMY.
And this is my point. The conservative base doesn't see politics as a
clash of competing legitimate ideas. It sees politics, and everything
else, as a clash between good and evil. When George W. Bush said
"you're either with us or you're against us," he wasn't just talking
about that one moment in history. Conservatives think that about
literally everything.
During the Cold War they were able to conveniently structure their
worldview along capitalist vs. communist lines. When that ended, they
had ten years to wait for al Qaeda to offer them a new group to hate.
So they spent the 90s adrift. And, rather than adapt to newer, more
complex realities and engage in an honest debate with Democrats and
liberals about how to move forward, they just cast American politics
in the same tribalist terms.
They hate Bill Clinton because, to them, the whole world is a Saturday
morning cartoon, populated by Good Guys and Bad Guys. They see the
world like I did when I was 5. And their identity as Good Guys
requires them, at all times, to be fighting against some historic and
unprecedented EVIL FORCE. After the cold war, they conveniently and
suddenly had a Democratic president to hate. So, they believed all
that shit about him not because they found it plausible, but because
it conveniently fit into their need for the opposition not just to be
the opposition, but to be THE BAD GUY.
In short, it had nothing whatsoever to do with policy (Clinton
actually agreed with them on a number of issues, like welfare reform).
They hated him because that's how they feel about the enemy, and all
those ridiculous slurs fit neatly into their need to justify their
hate.
So no, there is no equivalence. The difference is categorical. We feel
that a lively and engaged and honest policy debate is essential to
effective governance. They feel that He-Man needs to crush and defeat
Skeletor.
Conservatism in the 1990s had a distinctly anti-authority slant. The
fringe of that movement was utterly convinced that Clinton was a
tyrant who was going to come take their guns away and make them bow
down to the UN or something. Somewhat more "mainstream" conservatives,
at the very least, felt that it was the epitome of patriotism not just
to disagree with Clinton, but to absolutely loathe and detest him, to
regard him as illegitimate despite his having twice been legitimately
elected president.
And then, bizarrely, after a Republican got "elected" president, they
did a 180, and became hardcore authoritarians, regarding any criticism
of the new president, however mild, as not only unpatriotic, but
treasonous. the "good guy/bad guy" lines were redrawn: Bush was the
Good Guy. Al Qaeda was the Bad Guy--and so was anybody who said
anything bad about Bush the noble hero and his quest to vanquish the
Bad Guys.
As usual, there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement. It's
always good vs. evil.
And the hateful, Munich-beer-hall style crowds at McCain/Palin rallies
is a sign of how this is going to manifest in the Obama/Biden
administration. It'll be the 90s all over again but with a "terrorist"
flavor.
To these crowds of crazy-base-world conservatives, Barack Obama is the
Bad Guy for the same reason Bill Clinton is--he's the opposition, and
there is no such thing as legitimate opposition. He has a
Muslim-sounding name, which feeds nicely into their preexisting
framework of Muslim Bad Guys, but even if he didn't, they would still
be calling him a "terrorist" because to them, "terrorist" is simply a
synonym for "Bad Guy." And any Democrat about to be elected president
would by definition play that role for them.
I don't know exactly why they always see things this way. Maybe
tribalism is built into our genes by evolution (in ancient times it
made us more likely to protect our own genetic line, and thus those
genes survived). Maybe fundamentalist Christianity has something to do
with it, casting the universe as it does in stark good vs. evil terms
(witness the rumors that Obama might be the antichrist).
I suppose we can congratulate ourselves on having, to a much greater
degree, transcended our tribalist evolutionary roots and come to see
the world in more nuanced terms, as a clash of competing ideas rather
than a war between GI Joe and Cobra. Because there is absolutely no
equivalence. We are not like them. (And, to their credit, some
conservative intellectuals, like David Brooks and Christopher Buckley,
have begun to acknowledge that the intellectual conservatism of
decades past has been replaced by lizard-brained reactionary
ignorance--Buckley has even endorsed Obama).
They are the small-minded thugs. We strive to be ruled by the better
angels of our natures. Keep fighting the good fight. This time at
least, we're about to win."