[UK GUARDIAN] Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. "Has he ever studied the history?" he asks, in that familiar near-whisper.

The "he" is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood's movie and told reporters: "That was his version. The negro version did not exist."

Eastwood has no time for Lee's gripes. "He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate."

Lee shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin' story about that?" he growls. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."

Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. "A guy like him should shut his face."

Labels: Hollywood bias, race

One wonders what Sean Penn thinks about the below news? After all, Penn is a glowing fan -- he visited Venezuelan "President" Hugo Chavez a while back and even told the media that "much more positive for Venezuela than he is negative" and that his party's constitution is "a very beautiful document." And, Chavez contributed with Danny Glover for a $20 million movie deal.

CARACAS, Venezuela: President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country's intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

Under the new intelligence law, which took effect last week, Venezuela's two main intelligence services, the DISIP secret police and the DIM military intelligence agency, will be replaced with new agencies, the General Intelligence Office and General Counterintelligence Office, under the control of Chávez.

The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees.

"We are before a set of measures that are a threat to all of us," said Blanca Rosa Mármol de León, a justice on Venezuela's top court, in a rare public judicial dissent. "I have an obligation to say this, as a citizen and a judge. This is a step toward the creation of a society of informers."
The sweeping intelligence changes reflect an effort by Chávez to assert greater control over public institutions in the face of political challenges following a stinging defeat in December of a constitutional reform package that would have expanded his powers.

Chávez, who has insisted the defeat would not dampen his ambitions to transform Venezuela into a Socialist state, said the new law was intended to guarantee "national security" and shield against "imperialist attacks."

He lashed out at its critics as being agents of the "empire," meaning the United States.

Labels: Hollywood bias, Hypocrisy

Investors Business Daily has a quick retort of the factually-challenged HBO film, Recount, suggesting that Bush stole the 2000 election. What was it Joesph Goebbels said? "...when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Goebbels was attempting to criticize Churchill at that time, but the concept of the big lie -- that saturation and repetition of propaganda will revise memory of factual history -- has been elevated to pathetic heights vis-a-vis liberal romanticizing of the 2000 election.

In all its specific and unambiguous language, the [Florida state] law clearly stated in section 102.111: "If the county returns are not received by the Department of State by 5 p.m. of the seventh day following election, all missing counties shall be ignored, and the results shown by the returns on file shall be certified."

All the U.S. Supreme Court decided was to reaffirm that, according to the U.S. Constitution, the manner in which elections are conducted is up to each individual state and that the will of the people as expressed through the laws enacted by the popularly elected Florida legislature stood and could not be overturned by a Florida Supreme Court legislating from the bench.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says: "The principal issue in this case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn't even close. The vote was 7 to 2." It was Al Gore, he adds, "who made it a judicial question. It was he who brought it into the federal courts."

All the votes were counted, and recounted, and counted again. And not a single recount, either by local boards or major news organizations, found a way for Gore to win. A comprehensive review of 64,248 ballots in all 67 Florida counties by the Miami Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder, in partnership with USA Today, found that Bush's slender margin of 537 votes would have tripled to 1,665 votes even under the generous counting standards advocated by Gore.

Another review conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the request of CNN, the New York Times and other news organizations found that Bush still would have won Florida even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not ended the nonsense.

In 2000, the election boards of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties were all controlled by Democrats. The infamous butterfly ballot was designed by a Democrat. The attorney general of Florida at that time was Democrat Robert Butterworth.

Voters were instructed at the polling place: "After voting, check your ballot card to make sure your voting selections are clearly and cleanly punched and there are no chads left hanging on the back of the card."

The fact is, Gore himself requested recounts in only four counties where he thought he might gain votes, not lose them. Gore lost not because Florida was "stolen," but because he couldn't carry his home state of Tennessee, the people who knew him best.

Labels: Bush-Gore, Hollywood bias, media bias, revisionist history

"In my opinion, the four greatest achievements of America are its Revolution, the freeing of Europe, the freeing of slaves, and the freeing of Iraq. But it will take time to comprehend."

-- Dr. Shafeeq Al Mahdi, director for the National Directorate of Film and Theater.
That quote above comes from an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal regarding how the Arts have flourished with the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Obviously the transition to post-Saddam rule is quite dangerous for artists who now dodge religious extremists. But Saddam's oppression against the Arts was systemic:

A millennium later it was no longer the sultan's eye, but Saddam's. Under Saddam, virtually all cultural institutions had Baath party spies in their midst. Nonparty folk seldom progressed. Extensive Stasi-like files monitored everyone. A well-directed whisper led not just to the downfall of rivals but often also to their sudden disappearance. In theater, film and academe, unconfirmed suspicions and silent hatreds flourished, none of which -- who did what to whom and why -- has come clear in the post-Saddam era. Instead, many intellectuals have been anonymously killed and most of the Baath party files have disappeared -- including those deliberately stolen in the sacking of the National Archives after the allied invasion.

...Finally, I met a group of young art and movie festival organizers, named the Contemporary Visual Arts Society (CVAS), with no political ax to grind. They had organized a short-films festival in 2005 at a former children's theater in Baghdad and were since collaborating with festivals in Italy and Britain to train 20 new Iraqi filmmakers. CVAS's director, Nazar Rawy, an art academy graduate, minced no words: "Americans help only the politics; they don't help the culture. You can't have a normal paying audience today, so you must keep culture alive for now with help. That means either political money or cultural help from abroad. We have a strange situation: endless politics but almost no culture. Who has heard of such a situation before?"

According to Mr. Rawy, only three major Iraqi films have come out in recent years, all "allegories of the situation," all debuted outside of Baghdad. The first, "Underexposure," was filmed between 2003 and 2005 with help from Kodak. Mr. Rawy explains: "When the looting started, some film enthusiasts tried to save the National Film Archives and they found reels of old underexposed film. They tested it and found it usable, so they decided to make a movie with it, a fictional story about an Iraqi filmmaker trying to chronicle Saddam's collapse and the aftermath."

The second movie, with Dutch and British backers, appeared in 2006 and was titled "Dreams." It told the story of a woman political prisoner, locked up in a mental asylum by Saddam, suddenly being liberated into the post-Saddam chaos. "It's about the search for sanity in a nightmare," says Mr. Rawy. During the filming, the director was taken hostage by kidnappers. He was then rescued and detained by U.S. forces for three days. "The terrorists thought he was a foreign agent, and the Americans thought he was a terrorist," says Mr. Rawy.

The last film, "Crossing the Dust," in Kurdish and Arabic, also came out in 2006, and was backed by Kurdish cultural sources, according to Mr. Rawy. "It told the story," he says, "of a lost Arab boy found by two Kurds who lose their car in a dust storm, and all three wander around helping each other."

Mr. Rawy says that "these films all got acclaim and prizes around the world. But they were fortuitous successes, beginnings. Iraqi culture needs to gel. We are isolated and lost from each other. We need to be freed from politically directed culture. This will be the true liberation. Where are the intellectuals and artists and filmmakers of America -- why don't they help people like us?"
Understandable. But we've seen this before, and recently. Hollywood liberals complain of their own censored liberty and self-expression, which is a phantom as the very fact that they can complain with impunity proves there is no censorship. Conversely, Hollywood cares little for those actually battling violent censorship.

Mike Goldfarb opines:

Funny you should ask, Mr. Rawy. The friends and family of Theo VanGogh have wondered the same thing. So let me give you the answer: American intellectuals, artists and filmmakers, by and large, were against the liberation of your country and the routing of al Qaeda. In fact, they've demanded that President Bush and his cabinet be tried for war crimes. At the same time, their only responses to Islamofacism are excuses, silence or, in the case of the filmmakers, movies about the evil of your country's liberation and our country's government. The reason? Well, I'd suggest you ask them yourself, but they'd duck you in a Hollywood second.

Indeed, Mr. Rawy, you and your fellow artists have shown more courage just running a film festival than your American counterparts will ever possess. Just don't expect anything as trifling as a pat on the back for your troubles.

Labels: Hollywood bias, Iraq

I don't know if the website Obamamessiah is a promotion of Barack Obama as a religious figure or a subtle criticism of those who seem to be promoting Obama as just that -- but in any event it's chocked full of creepy examples of liberals and "progressives" (i.e., fascism by another name) who view Obama as something more than just another politician.

One such example comes from television and soccer-mom magnate Oprah Winfrey.

It isn't enough to tell the truth, Winfrey said. "We need politicians who know how to be the truth. I do believe, I do today, we have the answer to Miss Pittman's question – it's a question that the entire nation is asking – is he the one?" Winfrey said. "South Carolina – I do believe he's the one
Oh, really?

What's creepy about this isn't so much regarding Obama, but his followers.

As we've just started to discover - because of the main-stream media only now doing its job and covering Obama more critically - through the Tony Rezko link, or through Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is that Obama is a politician no different than any other.

Today's Washington Post: Regarding Obama's claim that his "very existence" can be traced to the Kennedy family "the key details are either untrue or grossly oversimplified."

In other words, Obama isn't one who tells "the truth" but just another politician who will exaggerate for influance sake. Politics is defined as the art of influancing people. Obama isn't the "New Testament," as NBC's Chris Matthew's labeled him (shamelessly, given he's "objective" reporter, right?), he's just another guy running for president.

Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton acknowledged yesterday that the senator from Illinois had erred in crediting the Kennedy family with a role in his father's arrival in the United States. He said the Kennedy involvement in the Kenya student program apparently "started 48 years ago, not 49 years ago as Obama has mistakenly suggested in the past."

...In his speech commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the Selma civil rights march, Sen. Obama linked his father's arrival in the United States with the turmoil of the civil rights movement. Although the airlift occurred before John F. Kennedy became president, Obama said that "folks in the White House" around President Kennedy were looking for ways to counter charges of hypocrisy and "win hearts and minds all across the world" at a time when America was "battling communism."

"So the Kennedys decided 'we're going to do an airlift,' " Obama continued. " 'We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.' This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves. . . . So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born."

A more accurate version of the story would begin not with the Kennedys but with a Kenyan nationalist leader named Tom Mboya, who traveled to the United States in 1959 and 1960 to persuade thousands of Americans to support his efforts to educate a new African elite. Mboya did not approach the Kennedys for financial support until Obama Sr. was already studying in Hawaii.
Read the rest.

Will the Kool-Aide drinking Obama acolytes begin to see their leader as a politician, not a savior?

Don't count on it.

Labels: 2008, academic bias, Hollywood bias, media bias, Obama

MTV’s antiwar picture, Stop-Loss, bombed at the box-office, taking in only $1.6 million on its opening day. This comes in spite of near universal fanfare and loads of free-media. A studio exec dismisses the poor showing anyway, saying, "No one wants to see Iraq war movies." That’s not quite right. What people don’t want to see are preachy antiwar movies about how awful their country is. At least not while we have 150,000 troops in Iraq.

During World War II, plenty of war-films did extremely well, and they did so by telling inspiring stories about the very best our country and allies had to offer. Hollywood’s most talented directors made films about U.S./British moral superiority, not its equivalence. One of my favorites is William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver, which Winston Churchill called, "propaganda worth 100 battleships." After completing the film, Wyler even enlisted despite being eligible for an exemption. Mrs. Miniver reached the screen in the same year as Casablana.

Even the Vietnam War, which inspired some great work, can be distinguished from Stop-Loss and the like. The antiwar movies of that era--most notably, Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning, Vietnam, and Platoon--all followed the conclusion of hostilities. What we’re seeing today, with Hollywood actively tearing this country down from within, is quite unique.

-- Jaime Sneider

Labels: Hollywood bias, Iraq

Via John Podhoretz, some interesting comments by Sly...

Sylvester Stallone has made a fourth Rambo movie, which will be released later this month, in which Rambo helps Burmese rebels. This would be a matter of no interest — Stallone is 60 years old, after all, the scandalously successful second Rambo was released 22 years ago, and an afterthought Rambo III came out in 1988 — except that Stallone's sixth Rocky movie, released last year, was surprisingly decent. The movie-idolator audience of the website Aint It Cool News interviewed Stallone in connection with the new film, and he gave a quite remarkable answer to a quite remarkable question.

The question:

In the eighties, John Rambo took on villains who were the real villains of the day: ruthless, invading Russian commie b—-rds hellbent on global communism. So I always assumed that if Rambo returned he'd be taking on the real villain of this day: extreme, radical Islamist b—rds hellbent on worldwide jihad. It seems like all of today's movies have [wimped] out on making Islamofacists the bad guys even though they are clearly the bad guys in the real world right now. Why is Rambo [wimping] out on this mission? Has he become politically correct?

Stallone: I thought the idea of Rambo dealing with Al-Qaeda, etc. would be an insult to our American forces that are actually dying trying to rid the world of this cancer. To have at the end of a 90 minute movie the character of Rambo seizing Osama bin Laden in a choke hold then dragging him into the Oval Office then tossing him in the President's lap declaring "The world is now safe, Chief" would be a bit insulting.
We've seen today every film that deals with the Middle Eastern situation has failed because it is a subject people find incredibly painful to sit through while it is ongoing. Maybe ten years in the future a good film will be produced on the subject. Right now I believe revealing a situation like the ongoing genocide in Burma provides a compelling story simply because it is true and is the longest running civil war in the world.

Labels: Hollywood bias, Islamic extremism, war on terror

Where War Deaths Are Worst

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Friday, January 04, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Warfare: Quick, which nation shows average civilian deaths at 33 a day in the last third of 2007? Now name the one where civilian deaths average 19 a day? If you guessed Iraq and Venezuela, you'd have it backward.

Shocking? Of course. But true. With even Venezuelan officials admitting their country clocked 12,249 murders in 2007, Hugo Chavez's socialist "sea of happiness" resembles a war zone. In December alone, Venezuela had 670 murders while Iraq had 476 — and that number is falling fast.

This is Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the place wildly praised by Hollywood eminentos like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn, and its crime is so bad it tops that seen in actual warfare.

People like Stone and Penn frequently criticize the Iraq war effort and its progress toward peace. But not once have we seen any of them express outrage at the slaughter brought to the streets of Venezuela courtesy of Hugo Chavez, a supposed champion of the poor.

Some champion. On Jan. 1, around the same time Hollywood film director Oliver Stone was loudly praising Chavez's revolution in Caracas, 63 murders started off Venezuela's New Year; 35 died the same day in Iraq.

Labels: Chavez, Hollywood bias, Iraq

Remember, "diversity" means a range of all views except those of conservatives. And "tolerance" means a participatory inclusion of all views except those of conservatives. These are the same people who bring up the McCarthy blacklist era every 30 seconds. The irony is dripping down.

While Democrats enjoy very public support from Hollywood's top actors and musicians, who often hold lavish events for their favorite candidates, Republican supporters in Hollywood try hard to keep their political views quiet.

"They learn very quickly, if they know what's good for them, to donate to the Democratic Party," said Andrew Breitbart, co-author of "Hollywood, Interrupted." "If they were to donate to the Republican Party, they would be exposed to career-ending ridicule, period."

...Still, Republicans have streamed into Hollywood for cash — former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney courted contributors in the state yesterday and held a town meeting just outside Hollywood.

In the first nine months of this year, Sen. John McCain of Arizona pulled in $390,000 from Hollywood, with Mr. Giuliani close behind at $360,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group based in Washington.

Those numbers pale in comparison to Democrats. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York drew $2.2 million from the movie, music and TV industries over the same period. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois pulled in $2.1 million from some A-list actors, including Tom Hanks, Tobey Maguire, Eddie Murphy, Edward Norton Jr., Morgan Freeman and Ben Stiller.
The first point is the most obvious -- Hollywood bigwigs aren't just slanted in their views but actually hire and fire based on them, something which would earn you or I a painful lawsuit if we did the same in our line of work. This makes the Hollywood elite bigots. It's not "reverse discrimination." It IS discrimination.

Having said that it's clear that there's a market for conservative politicans in Hollywood. It will never be as rewarding as it is for liberal politicans but Republicans would be foolish to at least not attempt the courtship of center-right and fully conservative entertainers.

UPDATE: Funny how themes just fall in line as a news day progresses.

Here's one brave Hollywood soul: Ron Silver.

Great commentary:

Often when I walked onto the set of the West Wing some of my colleagues would greet me with a chanting of “Ron, Ron, the neo-con.” It was all done in fun but it had an edge.

Since speaking in support of George Bush at the 2004 Republican convention I’ve become increasingly disadmired by members of my profession as well as many others. As of this writing my family tells me they still love me. I believe them, but stay tuned, as another presidential cycle is upon us.

I find myself increasingly amused as folks extrapolate my support for the Bush Doctrine and our battles in Iraq and Afghanistan to how I feel about everything. When backed into a corner I often describe my politics, quite snarkily I admit, as a little bit to the right of the left of center.

As far as I can tell, my politics, with regard to American foreign policy and projection of American power haven’t changed very much from what they’ve always been—what I would call revolutionary liberalism. I have always resisted reactionaries from the left or right, Democrat or Republican. At the moment, the reactionary forces on the left, the Democratic netroots and their supporters—Mickey Colitis from the Daily Cuss, MoveOn.org and the Moores and Sheehans—are more fearful to me than the traditional reactionary forces of the extreme right. And the Democratic Party seems to be listening to them.

Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate only eight years ago, gave an extraordinary speech on national security last week that the mainstream media did not cover. It’s a shame. And it’s a shame the Democratic Party shunned Lieberman and tried to defeat him in a primary. They made it clear that there is no place for him in the party he’s dedicated his life to. I’m a Joe Lieberman Democrat.

JFK reportedly remarked, “sometimes the party asks too much.” He was referring to the deal his Democratic Party made with southern segregationists to maintain control of Congress. His words are as true now as they were then. Sometimes the party asks too much.

I count myself firmly in the tradition of Wilson, FDR, Truman and Kennedy…and yes, Reagan and George W. Bush. “Go anywhere, bear any burden,” “try to do our best to make a world safe for democracy.” Our national mission, a worthy and ennobling one, is to expand freedom where we can. These are revolutionary goals very much in keeping with our Founders’ vision. They are hardly conservative, let alone neo-conservative goals.

My reactionary former colleagues and friends were quite content with the status quo with Saddam in power in a post 9/11 world. I was not. Revolutionary, not reactionary. My friends sound a bit racist when they insist on Arab-Muslim incapacities to expand freedoms and maintain their faith. I believe the Arab world will work its way to achieve this. I know that it will most likely come about through internal Arab-Muslim struggles and not via external pressures, but I believe we are uniquely capable of helping it along. Uniquely, because our Founding scriptures declare, “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights.” Revolutionary, not reactionary.

Many people felt that the threat posed by Saddam was more tolerable than the risk of removing him. I disagreed and still do. Many of these people now feel that the threat of a nuclear Iran is more tolerable than the risk involved in making sure Iran doesn’t have such capabilities. I think they have it backwards. Many people feel reluctant to acknowledge that the “war on terror” is a real war. There is an unwillingness to identify the enemy, which is clearly a world-wide, malignant, metastatic Islamic jihadism, that will only be defeated ultimately with the Islamic world rising to reject the cancer. We cannot fight a war by pretending we’re not in one. This requires transformative, upset the apple cart thinking. It requires people who are revolutionary, not reactionary. As much as we might like, we cannot return to a pre-9/11 world.

The President is challenging the world with a new order. There is always passionate opposition to change. Have grievous mistakes been made? Yes. But just as Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan laid the foundations for fighting and prevailing in the Cold War, Bush has responded to 9/11 with a foreign policy revolution of similar magnitude: a reorganization of government institutions and appropriate legislation to meet the emerging threats.

Containment and deterrence are ineffective in this brave new world. There is no containment if you can’t see the enemy; there is no deterrence if the enemy desires death.

I believe the President’s critics are profoundly mistaken. I believe they misunderstand how he’s trying to protect us. I believe they misunderstand the nature of the threat. I believe they misunderstand history. If they succeed in dismantling what President Bush has set in motion, the results may well be catastrophic and history will never forgive them.

George W. Bush: a revolutionary liberal internationalist? History may so decree. Let’s wait and see.

My philosophy, at the end of the day, bottom line, as they say: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but labels never hurt me.”

Labels: campaign finance, Hollywood bias

We've all heard the stories, many true, some apocryphal, of soldiers returning home from Vietnam only to be disrespected and shunned by an ungrateful nation. How many were called war criminals or spat upon is as controversial as it is unknowable. But there's one thing we know our troops never experienced. We never filled the movie theaters during wartime with films calling them war criminals, rapists and, figuratively, spitting on them or on their mission.

Not so today. Hollywood has been churning out antiwar movies at a blistering pace of late, with more to come. We've already had Rendition, a tendentious, plodding assault on the war on terror, seemingly as-told-to by the ACLU, starring Reese Witherspoon, Peter Sarsgaard, Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal. There's the meandering In the Valley of Elah, written and directed by Paul Haggis, about a family dealing with a cover-up of their soldier-son's death in an unnecessary war. The Kingdom, more exciting than most, deals with an FBI team's attempt to investigate a terrorist attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia. Its antiwar credentials come from suggesting that the sworn lawmen (and women) investigating the slaughter of families playing softball are no better than the murderers.

Coming next month: Lions for Lambs, starring Tom Cruise, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep — which gives every indication of being a theatrical version of a loaded question from Helen Thomas at a White House briefing — and Redacted, a fake documentary directed by Brian De Palma, in which U.S. troops are depicted as dehumanized rapists. Next spring comes Stop Loss, starring Ryan Phillippe, the supposedly heroic soldier who refuses to fight. And there are a slew of antiwar books being adapted for the screen as well.

To be sure, many of these films don't attack the troops directly. Some are thoughtful in their critiques, others less so. Regardless, this is still uncharted territory. "These movies certainly are more willing to be critical of the military and misconduct of individual soldiers. Certainly no such feature was made like these during ... the Vietnam War," Charles Ferguson, a political scientist and creator of the anti-Iraq war documentary, No End In Sight, recently told The Philadelphia Inquirer. But here's the interesting part: So far, these movies are tanking. Rendition opened on 2,250 screens, with three Oscar winners in the cast, and it was beaten its opening weekend by a re-release of the 14-year-old A Nightmare Before Christmas. Elah was a bigger bomb than those used in the "shock and awe" campaign. The Kingdom earned less than $50 million, and surely only did that well because it was marketed as an action movie rather than an antiwar one. Jeanine Basinger, a film historian at Wesleyan University, speculates that "these films are coming forward during the progress of a war and questioning it sooner may mean that the general public is rejecting what our leaders are telling us ... and want to know more about the war."

This is an odd, yet unsurprising, interpretation in an age when The Daily Show is a primary news source.

The public doesn't get to decide what movies are made. As President Bush might say, Hollywood is the "decider." The public determines which movies are successful. Perhaps the studios of yesteryear knew something today's moguls don't. Maybe Americans don't like to see America and her troops run down, even during an unpopular war.

When Peter Berg tested The Kingdom on Americans, he was horrified when the audience cheered when the FBI killed the terrorists at the end. "Am I experiencing American bloodlust?" the director agonized. Berg's contemptuous reaction toward American audiences may point to a few of the reasons these movies are faring poorly at American box offices.

First, economics. Hollywood cares less and less about what Americans think of their products because as domestic movie attendance has declined, Hollywood shifted its aim to foreign markets. In America, filmmakers are at pains to insist their antiwar fare isn't anti-American. No such distinctions need be made when these films open at Cannes, Venice and Toronto. Denouncing the war isn't only good marketing in Europe, it's the fastest route to critical acclaim.

Second, Americans may not be as passionately opposed to the war as the polls have led Hollywood to believe. Left-wing bloggers, hyper-rich Democratic donors and antiwar activists hate the war with biblical fury. But many average Americans are depressed by the war because, until recently, it was going so badly. The polls don't capture this distinction very well.

This illuminates an underdiscussed dynamic of our times. Americans are both antiwar and anti-antiwar. Polls show they are disgusted with Republicans and Democrats. Hollywood and the left generally have misread this political discontent thinking there's a mandate for their trite Vietnam-era nostalgia for mass protest and Joan Baez speechifying. But few Americans are eager to spend their money to listen to the Jane Fonda set say, "I told you so!" for two hours. Especially not when we've heard it all before. (Indeed, Redacted is essentially a remake of his Vietnam movie Casualties of War.)

By confusing the public's war-weariness with their own carefully cultivated rage, they've badly overreached. Rage may be a good box office draw; exhaustion isn't. The late film critic Pauline Kael is reported to have said that Nixon couldn't have won because she didn't know anybody who voted for him. Similarly, maybe everyone Paul Haggis knows shares his hatred for the war, but he just doesn't know enough people to make a hit.
-- Jonah Goldberg

Labels: antiwar loonies, capitulation, Hollywood bias, Iraq, white flag

Funny review by John Podhoretz; no doubt he's an evil zionist supporting warmonger.

Streep plays a reporter for a news network who also doubles as a correspondent for Time in her copious spare time. She arrives at the Capitol Hill office of Republican Senator Cruise, who has a scoop for her: There is a new strategy to win the war in Afghanistan. At that very moment in Afghanistan, Special Forces troops are being moved into position to implement Cruise's new strategy. Two of the Special Forces troops are former students of liberal professor Redford, who is in his office having a sit-down with an impressive but unmotivated college student.

And there you have Lions for Lambs. The movie basically consists of three one-act plays, with two characters each, taking place simultaneously: Cruise and Streep in the Senate office, Redford and Unmotivated Student in a campus office, and Redford's two students shot up and bleeding on an Afghan mountain while al Qaeda operatives close in on them. Redford tells Unmotivated the story of his two students, little knowing they are meeting their fate at that very moment. He begged them not to go.

But they decided they had to get involved in order to further their cause of bringing social justice to the ghetto--to join the military and fight in the war on terror to give them unimpeachable political credentials. Redford sees in Unmotivated the same bravery, the same conviction, the same ability to stand up for something.
Because that is what it is all about--standing up for something. "Do something," Redford tells Unmotivated, who replies that politicians tell lies and why shouldn't he just go for the good life where you make money? But this is a Hollywood picture, and we know that Hollywood is far too monastic a place to abide anyone who is just in it for the money.

Cruise, who looks far more like John Edwards than any Republican politician, offers plastic platitudes to Streep. Mistakes were made in the past, he says, but now is the time to look forward. She is old enough to have heard it all before, she says, in the language of Vietnam-era Gen. Creighton Abrams--and besides, people like Cruise lied us into war in Iraq. He points out that her network used to offer serious news reporting and now has a toothy anchorwoman with big hair. She hangs her head in shame.

After Cruise gets a phone call informing him that the new strategy is already a failure because Redford's two students are bleeding on the mountain, he turns to her and speaks the truth. He is tired of America being humiliated, he says. She leaves his office, begins to hyperventilate, and tells her boss that Cruise is going to become the next president and use nuclear weapons on unsuspecting Muslims. Her boss tells her to write up the news without mentioning the whole nuclear-weapons thing. She says she will not be a vehicle for warmongering propaganda the way the entire news media were the last time. He says she'd better, or Streep's sick mother will no longer be able to receive 24-hour care.

The last thing we see is Unmotivated reading the crawl on Streep's cable news channel simply stating that there is a new strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan. Streep has given in. We are left to understand that the only thing standing between America and Armageddon at the hands of Tom Cruise, Evil Republican, is the Unmotivated College Student choosing to "stand up for something."
Will he do it? Never before have we seen such shades of gray! Thank the Lord, we have at last moved past the black-and-white rhetoric of the past six years!

Labels: Afghanistan, antiwar loonies, Hollywood bias, war on terror

A former member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council, Daniel Benjamin, debunks several myths promoted in large part by Hollywood's latest movie titled "Rendition."

With hearings in Congress, legal cases bouncing up to the Supreme Court and complaints from Canada and our European allies, the issue of rendition is everywhere. There's even a new, eponymously titled movie in a theater near you, starring Reese Witherspoon as a bereft wife whose innocent husband gets kidnapped and Meryl Streep as the frosty CIA chief who ordered the snatch. Like most covert actions and much of the war on al-Qaeda, the practice is shrouded in mystery -- and, increasingly, the suspicion that it's synonymous with torture and lawlessness.
In fact, the term "rendition" in the counterterrorism context means nothing more than moving someone from one country to another, outside the formal process of extradition. For the CIA, rendition has become a key tool for getting terrorists from places where they're causing trouble to places where they can't. The problem is where these people are taken and what happens to them when they get there. As a former director for counterterrorism policy on the National Security Council staff, I've been involved with the issue of rendition for nearly a decade -- and some of the myths surrounding it need to be cleared up.

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

Nope. George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States "rendered to justice" its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus, where FBI agents arrested him. (Younis had participated in the 1985 hijacking of a Jordanian plane and was implicated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which left a U.S. Navy diver dead.) President George H.W. Bush approved the kidnapping in 1990 of Mexican physician Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was believed to be involved in the torture and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration official. Nothing says that renditions can involve only suspected terrorists; Israel's abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 could be called a rendition, though the term was not yet in use.

Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

2. People who are "rendered" inevitably end up in a foreign slammer -- or worse.

Actually, that's not a foregone conclusion. Alvarez was brought to the United States. So was Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two CIA employees in their cars outside the agency's Langley headquarters in 1993, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Both were apprehended in Pakistan, whose leaders decided that the nation would rather not have those two -- folk heroes to some -- sitting in jail, awaiting extradition. Pakistan's leaders feared that cooperating with the United States would be dangerously unpopular, so they wanted the suspects out of the country quickly. For many pro-U.S. Muslim leaders, that concern has only deepened as anti-Americanism has soared.

By my count, most renditions since 1995 have involved moving individuals from one foreign country to another -- not grabbing someone in Washington and carting them off to North Africa, as happens to Witherspoon's onscreen husband. Such operations typically occur in secret because, again, Muslim leaders (especially in the Arab world) want to shield their cooperation with Washington from their anti-American publics. The CIA has acted as a go-between, arranging the transfers and providing transportation. Usually those being rendered are not brought to the United States because, while the U.S. government may have an abundance of intelligence showing their malfeasance, it doesn't have enough courtroom evidence. There's a big difference between the two.

One other safeguard: During the Clinton years, the United States required the country that received a rendered person to have some kind of legal process against the suspect -- an arrest warrant or indictment, for example. It's not clear whether that is still the case. Perhaps Michael Mukasey, President Bush's attorney general nominee, can check.

3. Step one of a rendition involves kidnapping the suspect.

The individual may feel as though he's being kidnapped, but that's not usually what's going on. Most of the time, the person is detained by the authorities of the country he is in. They will then hand him off to the CIA, which will fly him to his destination.

In rare cases when the country of residence is a hostile one, an "extraordinary rendition" can be carried out: a covert effort to abduct the suspect and spirit him out of the country. The CIA put considerable time into efforts to capture Osama bin Laden this way from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Had it worked, it would have been an extraordinary rendition -- and Americans would have cheered.

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically. The guidelines for Clinton-era renditions required that subjects could be sent only to countries where they were not likely to be tortured -- countries that gave assurances to that effect and whose compliance was monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. It's impossible to be certain that those standards were upheld every time, but serious efforts were made to see that they were. At a minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria) were off-limits. Another key difference: Renditions before Bush were carried out to disrupt terrorist activity, not to gather intelligence or to interrogate individuals.

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards. The administration has apparently sent someone to Syria, and Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was evidently grabbed in Macedonia and interrogated in Afghanistan in a manner that sure sounds like torture. In light of this and other revelations, the criticism that the administration has "defined down" torture looks pretty persuasive. It's probably a good bet that Congress or the next administration will reform the program, or abolish it outright.

5. Pretty much anyone -- including U.S. citizens and green card holders -- can be rendered these days.

Not so, although the movie "Rendition" -- in which Witherspoon's Egyptian-born husband gets the black-hood treatment and is yanked from a U.S. airport and taken to a North African chamber of horrors -- is bound to spread this myth. A " U.S. person" (citizen or legal resident) has constitutional protections against being removed from the country through rendition, and there have been no incidents to suggest the contrary. In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar -- a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York's JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured -- is way too close for comfort.

Labels: CIA, civil liberties, Hollywood bias, intelligence, interrogation, media bias, Smearing the Troops, surveillance, tribunals, TSP, war on terror, wiretap

ALEXANDRIA, La. (AP) — Two of the "Jena Six" defendants helped present the Video of the Year award on Black Entertainment Television's Hip Hop Awards. Katt Williams, a comedian and host of the show broadcast Thurdsay night, introduced Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis as two of the students involved in a case of "systematic racism."

"By no means are we condoning a six-on-one beat-down," Williams said during his introduction of the teens, accused of knocking a white student unconscious and then kicking and stamping on him. "... But the injustice perpetrated on these young men is straight criminal."

Jones and Purvis got a standing ovation as they walked onto the stage at the Atlanta Civic Center, where the awards show was filmed on Saturday. "They don't look so tough, do they?" Williams joked."
No, apparently they're only tough when they have four other friends to join them in a six-on-one pile on.

Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters asks the obvious but necessary question, "Just imagine if six white students beat a black student, and then two of them were allowed to present at the Country Music Awards. Think that would generate some outrage?"

Labels: Hollywood bias, Hypocrisy, jena

[Associated Press] A two-year study released last year by the University of California at Los Angeles concluded that special effects explosions, idling vehicles and diesel generators make the entertainment industry a major Southern California polluter, second only to the oil industry.
You can read the rest. The environloony Left's "carbon offset" donations and other such guilt-driven nonsense are simply the modern equivilant to old world Catholics who would pay indulgence taxes in order to sin more (you'll remember that paid indulgences sparked a reformation led by Martin Luther).

No further comment necessary.

Labels: climate, environment as religion, global warming, Hollywood bias

And the emmy for most out of touch with reality goes to.... Sally Field!

[MRC] Using her Emmy acceptance comments on stage to praise mothers, Sally Field turned political Sunday night as she declared: "Let's face it, if the mothers ruled the world, there would be no Goddamned wars in the first place."
Oh, Reaaaally?



Well, there are countless mothers of suicide bombers whom disprove Field's naive theory. In fact, the culture of Islamic extremism fosters the concept that children are procreated especially for martyrdom.

Just a few examples:

A martyr is a sacrificial lamb, a sacrifice to obtain salvation, which is evident from the cultural term given to terrorists - Fida'e, which literally means 'the sacrifice.' The Islamic argument against blood atonement is somewhat contradicted when it comes to the concept of martyrdom in Islam. Blood atonement is hardly absent in Islam. In fact, blood atonement makes it possible to intercede on the behalf of others, since the Shaheed [suicide bomber] takes on Christ-like abilities, interceding for seventy members of his or her family, who would otherwise have entered hell's fire. So, in order to alleviate the suffering in hell, at least one family member is encouraged to be given as a sacrifice."
-- Walid Shoebat, author of Why We Want To Kill You: The Jihadist Mindset and How to Defeat it.

A new online magazine published by the 'Women's Information Office on the Arabian Peninsula' aims to teach women how to contribute to jihad, or holy war. "Our main mission: push our children to the battlefield, like Al-Khansaa," declares Umm Raad al-Tamimi in the magazine. The monthly publication champions the ideology of Al Qaeda terrorist chief Osama bin Laden: "Drive infidels from the Arabian Peninsula," or Saudi Arabia.
-- Agence France-Presse, Sep 4, 2004

"The mother of the Palestinian suicide bomber who blew himself up in Eilat three days ago also told Agence France-Presse that she was happy her son was martyred. She revealed that she had said goodbye [to him] before he left for his mission and had wished him success, and that she was happy that 'God had heard her prayers.'"
-- Al-Hayat, February 1, 2007

The mother of the first female Palestinian suicide bomber has said she is proud of her daughter and hopes more women will follow her example. ... Body parts found at the scene suggested that an attack on Sunday, which killed an 81-year-old Israeli man and left more than 100 injured, was the first of its kind by a woman. ... "She was happy when martyrdom attacks were carried out against the Israelis and told me she wished she would one day carry out such an attack," another relative, Manal Shaheen, said.

-- BBC, Female bomber's mother speaks out, 30 January, 2002

"Allah be praised, I am a Muslim and I believe in Jihad. Jihad is one of the elements of the faith and this is what encouraged me to sacrifice Muhammad in Jihad for the sake of Allah. My son was not destroyed, he is not dead; he is living a happier life than I. Had my thoughts been limited to this world, I would not sacrifice Muhammad. I am a compassionate mother to my children, and they are compassionate towards me and take care of me. Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr's death for the sake of Allah… Jihad is a religious obligation incumbent upon us, and we must carry it out. I sacrificed Muhammad as part of my obligation."
-- Umm Nidal, mother of suicide bomber Muhammad Farhat, in an interview with Dream 2 TV (Egypt), December 21, 2005

"I feel the martyr is lucky because the angels usher him to his wedding in heaven. I feel the earth moves under the occupiers' feet… There is no doubt that a child [martyr] suggests that the new generation will carry on the mission with determination. The younger the martyr - the greater and the more I respect him… They [mothers of martyrs] willingly sacrifice their offspring for the sake of freedom. It is a great display of the power of belief. The mother is participating in the great reward of the Jihad to liberate Al-Aqsa… I talked to a young man… [who] said: '… I want to marry the black-eyed [beautiful] women of heaven.' The next day he became a martyr. I am sure his mother was filled with joy about his heavenly marriage. Such a son must have such a mother."
-- Mufti Sheikh Ikrimeh Sabri, Al-Ahram Al-Arabi (Egypt), October 28, 2000

In an interview with Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nuzhah Ziyadeh, also known as Umm Souheil, a 55-year-old woman from the Jebaliya refugee camp who had "sacrificed two of her sons as Shahids for the sake of Allah," expressed "pride and a sense of honor that Allah had honored her with the martyrdom of her two sons Souheil and Muhammad, and made their wish come true." The paper called Umm Souheil " Al-Khansaa" – referring to the mother of Shahids in Islamic history. -- Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), June 7, 2003

The Palestinians are fighting against the Zionists with a lethal weapon - the weapon of the multi-birthing woman. If they kill ["The Engineer" Yahyah] 'Ayyash, or if a Mujaheed is Martyred, the wombs of the women pushed, push, and will continue to push thousands Ayyash's of Mujahideen who suckle with their mothers' milk, the education for Jihad... Ah, If only [former Israeli PM Ariel] Sharon and his angels of destruction knew that the mother of a Shahid [suicide bomber] receives the news of her son's Martyrdom with cries of joy... One of them, so it was reported, took an oath to send the four sons she had left to the battlefield so they would gain Martyrdom as well, just like their brother. We wish that just like the Zionist airports were filled with those vagabond homosexuals on their way in, they will be filled once again on their way out, without anyone feeling sorry for them..."
-- Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), June 5, 2001.

A large number of summer camps were named after Shahids [suicide bombers], without distinction between whether they were involved in attacks in the Palestinian territories or carried out suicide bombings within the Green Line [Israel]. The following is a partial roundup of some camps that were mentioned in the Palestinian media:

Two summer camps were named after the first female suicide bomber Wafaa Idris, in Qalqiliya and in the Al-Am'ari refugee camp; A summer camp in eastern Gaza, organized by the Fatah Shabiba, was named after female suicide bomber Ayat Al-Akhras ; A summer camp was named after commander of Fatah's military wing Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Tulkarem, Ra'id Karmi; A summer camp in Gaza was named after Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades Commander in Gaza, Jihad Al-'Amarin; A summer camp was named after the Shahid Mahmoud Al-Jamasi, who blew up an IDF boat in Gaza; A summer camp in the town of 'Azoun in the Qalqiliya district, organized by the National Guidance Administration and named after the Shahid Muhammad Salim, an activist in the Hamas military wing Iz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades who was killed while trying to blow up a tank; A boys' summer camp in Dir Ballah named after Shahids; A boys' summer camp named after "the Shahids of Surif"; The "Loyalty to the Blood of the Martyrs" summer camp; The "Loyalty and Love for Chairman Yasser Arafat" summer camp, which this year was named after Shahids from the Rafah district; The "Independence and [Refugee] Return" summer camp in Nablus; At an Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades summer camp in the Hebron district, the children held a closing ceremony which included a play called "The Shahid's Wedding" – that is, his wedding in Paradise to the 72 black-eyed virgins; The Charity Organization for Aid to Orphans and the Needy in Jericho, which is close to the Hamas movement, concluded its summer camps with an exhibit of handicrafts. The 230 children participating in these camps were divided into groups with names that have Islamic connotations. Some of the names were: Al-Khansaa, Al-Tayyar, and Paradise.
-- Middle East Media Research Institute special report.

Labels: antiwar loonies, Delusional Democrats, Hollywood bias, Islamic extremism, Moonbats, why they hate us

The amount of ignorance and stupidity in Hollywood is staggering when one considers how the industries of media and entertainment so often promote celebrities as thoughtful and intelligent.

The latest example of this comes from (what else) the HBO show "Real Time with Bill Maher."

This week it was "actor/activist" Mos Def promoting 9-11 conspiracy theories, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and, yes, even moon landing conspiracy theories.

MOS DEF: When the Revolutionary War was going on, George Washington and all them dudes was terrorists as far as the Queen was concerned. [The Queen? A King ruled Great Britain at that time.]

DEF: I don't believe it was bin Laden today, I don't believe it was never him. I think it's some dude just standing, I don't even, I can't even believe. I don't even, I'm sorry, I'm from the projects, I know danger. I don't feel no danger from that shit, those mother-fuckers.

BILL MAHER: But you don't think bin Laden knocked down the Word Trade Center?

DEF: Absolutely not.

MAHER: Come on.

DEF: I don't. I don't. You know what, I don't.

MAHER: That's where you lose me, my friend, and I'm so on your side, but you know what.

DEF: In any barbershop I am so not alone, I'm so not alone.

MAHER: That doesn't mean you're right.

DEF: That don't mean it is not valid neither. Highly-educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 9/11 theory. It's like the magic-bullet and all that shit.

MAHER: Then what happened?

DEF: I don't believe these mother-fuckers have been to the moon either, but that's just me.
What an embarrassment.

I suppose it's almost not worth the effort to punch holes in Mr. Def's arguments, but I'll do it anyway.

Idiocy 1: 9/11 not Bin Laden.

Look, even Bin Laden says Bin Laden did it. Popular Mechanics wrote an entire book debunking 9-11 conspiracy theories. Theories, by the way, of which not a single expert in aviation, engineering or building construction is ever offered. It's always some damned Humanities professor, juvenile college kids (like the creators of Loose Change) or the like offering their crackpot expertise. Anyway, read the book.

Idiocy 2: The Brits considered George Washington a terrorist.

Putting aside that there wasn't a queen of England at that time this is just an ignorant misunderstanding and grouping of all revolutionary characters. It's true that the British considered some American revolutionaries as criminals. But Washington was a respected general by both sides. He was a former officer in the British military and renowned hero for fighting the French during the French & Indian war. King George was amazed that the leader of any country would so willingly give up their power. Upon Washington's retirement from politics after two terms as president George stated "if Washington went back to his farm after his public career he would be the greatest character of the age."

Idiocy 3: Magic bullet theory?

There is no magic bullet theory, as the recent documentary "The Kennedy Assassination - Beyond Conspiracy" shows (often replayed on Discovery and History channels). In short, conspiracy theorists neglect to mention that Kennedy and Connally were sitting at different heights. Their analysis always assumes they were at the same heights, which is how they conclude the crazy zigs and zags of the bullet. Meanwhile Vincent Bugliosi (hardly a conservative) has just produced a 1600-page volume debunking the JFK conspiracy theories.

Perhaps when Mr. Def next visits a book store he can pick it up, along with a biography on Washington or a the Revolutionary War.

Idiocy 4: No moon landing.

Too stupid a conspiracy to comment further.

Labels: antiwar loonies, Hollywood bias, Moonbats

Ask yourself, were Barak Obama not running for president, if so many in the Hollywood community weren't squarely behind Obama, would this story had ever seen the light of day? This story is a true measure of Hollywood delusion.

[LA Times] With no date for the release, questions are being raised about whether political pressure is behind its [the ABC miniseries "Path To 9-11"] current status as a stalled or discarded DVD project. The reasons are murky, but the miniseries' writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, believes it's crystal clear: Powerful forces are out to protect Bill Clinton's presidential legacy and shield Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ( D-N.Y.) from any potential collateral damage in her bid for the White House.

Nowrasteh, also one of the miniseries' many producers, said he was told by a top executive at ABC Studios that "if Hillary weren't running for president, this wouldn't be a problem."

"Whatever anyone may think about me or this movie, this is a bad precedent, a dangerous precedent, to allow a movie to be buried," added Nowrasteh, who received death threats even before the miniseries was broadcast last September. "Because the next time they'll go after another movie. The Bush administration may go after a movie. The next administration may go after a movie. No matter who it is, they may go after a movie. I think this town needs to stand up."

Even before "The Path to 9/11" aired on ABC late last summer, the docudrama ignited a political firestorm, almost entirely from high-profile Democratic leaders who viewed its account of events leading up to the terrorist attacks as a right-wing hatchet job on the Clinton administration and its efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Attempts to pressure ABC to cancel the miniseries at the time were unsuccessful, but last-minute network edits were imposed to quell the critical outcry.

An ABC spokeswoman reached Tuesday would say only that the company "has no release date at this time," and she declined to comment further.

Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton's campaign staff did not return an e-mail or a phone call seeking comment.

Last year, a Clinton spokesman referred to the ABC enterprise as "despicable," and then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and four other Democratic senators signed a letter to Disney Chief Executive Robert A. Iger stating that if the miniseries were shown it would "deeply damage" Disney's reputation. As a result of the tumult, ABC was unable to attract advertisers for the miniseries.

Thus far, few have noted the DVD's absence in the marketplace. Among those who have are conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, who questioned last month why the disc isn't available on the nation's retail shelves. (Limbaugh and Nowrasteh have met on several occasions but do not regularly socialize, Nowrasteh said.)

With a possible writers strike and fall television premieres around the corner, the DVD's release hasn't galvanized Hollywood as a cause célèbre. But voices traditionally associated with the political left are disturbed by the DVD's uncertain fate. This isn't about politics, said film director Oliver Stone, but about the right of artists to have their work distributed.

"This is a shame; it's censorship in the most blatant way," said Stone, who has hired Nowrasteh for several writing projects. "I'm not vouching for its accuracy -- it's a dramatization -- but it's an important work and needs to be seen."
Limbaugh and Oliver Stone see this the same? The planets are aligning!

Seriously, the only reason this became a story is because a highly-influential conservative persona reminded conservatives and because Obama has seemed to have drained some support that would have normally gone to the Clintons.

One doubts whether Mitt Romney and fellow Mormons will have as much luck protesting the release of September Dawn, a movie about the 9/11/1857 massacre of 120 people, supposedly at the hands of Mormon leaders.

But that's Hollywood, eh? They'll find some particular incidents where a Christian murdered in the name of God and propagate it endlessly while avoiding all of the Islamic extremist murder in the current era.

It's not their take on, say, the Spanish Inquisition, or Timothy McVeigh's religious beliefs that bother me. It's their refusal to address Islamic extremism - a far more relevant topic than 200-year-old Mormons - in any way, shape or form.

Thus do the Palestinian terrorists in Tom Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears become in the movie version European "Neo-Fascists," whatever the hell that is, or thus does Hollywood offer up a fresh helping of moral equivalence, such as in Spielberg's Munich.

Labels: 9-11, Clinton, Hollywood bias, media bias