Friday, October 5, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky
There was a time, as my wife, who is a TCM addict, keeps reminding me when there was no more patriotic place on earth than Hollywood. It wasn’t just that such super stars as Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable and Tyrone Power, enlisted in the military; that others volunteered to entertain the troops through USO shows and appearances at the Hollywood Canteen; while major film directors, such as John Houston, Frank Capra, George Stevens and John Ford, turned their talents to turning out military training and propaganda films. It was also true that Hollywood’s moguls, including Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and Daryl Zanuck, churned out pro-American, anti-Nazi, movies by the gross. It provided potent punch at the box office, but it also served to keep American morale high even in those early years when we seemed to be losing the war.
Today, as you may have noticed, when Hollywood deigns to make a war movie, America’s soldiers, more often than not, are depicted as the bad guys.
This turnaround makes sense when you realize that nearly everyone engaged in writing, directing or appearing in movies today, is a left-winger. Although they’d insist they are as patriotic as those who made movies in the past, they simply can’t get past their anti-American mindset. For them, Obama is the perfect president. He opposes gun ownership, deplores capitalism and denies American exceptionalism, while simultaneously voicing his approval of same-sex marriages, Islam and the U.N.
There are a few exceptions in Hollywood. They are mainly those working below the line, as drivers, carpenters and stunt men. Among the few recognizable names are Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Morgan Brittany, Gary Sinise, Patricia Heaton and, of course, Clint Eastwood. That’s why it hurts me to say that I wish Eastwood hadn’t shown up in Tampa. It merely served to remind me that even icons get old. I wasn’t too surprised that what was supposed to be a five-minute interlude morphed into a 12-minute snoozearama. But, then, Eastwood never was one to turn out a 90-minute movie when he could spread it out over two and a half hours.
I do commend him, however, for coming up with the whimsical notion of smacking down an empty suit sitting in an empty chair.
In the aftermath of the GOP convention, I heard some people worry that if Romney failed to deliver on his promise of 12 million new jobs, it could come back and bite him in 2016, the way that George H.W. Bush’s vow of “no new taxes” killed him in 1992. I don’t think so. It’s one thing to promise not to raise taxes and then raise them, as opposed to promising to deliver 12 million jobs and falling short by a million or two. Frankly, I could deliver 12 million new jobs by simply lowering taxes, taking the federal boot off the neck of the oil and coal industries, repealing ObamaCare and cutting the EPA down to size.
In spite of the mass media being in the tank for Obama, I frankly think they’re hurting themselves more than they’re helping the Democrats. For one thing, even left-wingers have finally begun admitting that the media is openly biased. For another, when newspapers and the major networks keep promoting the lie that the economy is getting better in spite of what is obvious even to small children, they have lost all credibility with moderates and independents.
As Mark Twain once pointed out, people who ignore the media run the risk of being uninformed, whereas those who depend on it for their news are nearly certain to be misinformed.
It’s impossible for me to get inside the heads of those who even at this late date are wishing that by some miracle, Ron Paul would wind up being the GOP nominee. That’s because inside those heads it is very dark, very small and very badly ventilated. I mean, here’s a 77-year-old guy who desperately wanted to be the president for the next four or eight years, but can’t be bothered to serve one more term in the House, where he could work to move along Romney’s agenda.
Frankly, it amazes me that there is anyone outside an asylum who would think that Obama deserves a second term in the Oval Office. To my mind, it comes down to: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I must have stinkweed for brains.”
Calling Obama’s fans sheep is probably unfair to sheep, a remarkable animal that provides mankind with everything from wool to lamb chops. They should probably be called the Stepford electorate, a bunch of lobotomized zombies who have been programmed to smile vacuously while voting for any dunce with a (D) after his name.
Finally, getting back to Hollywood, it’s not merely a community or even an industry, it’s a state of mind or, rather, mindlessness, where people are judged not by what they actually do, but merely by the left-wing talking points they repeat ad nauseam.
These people will call you a racist if you oppose Obama, but will dismiss the remarkable likes of Thomas Sowell, Allen West and Condoleezza Rice, as Oreos. They will hold fund-raisers promoting something as silly and faddish as same-sex marriages, but say nary a word about the 70% illegitimacy rate that plagues black communities.
But, perhaps worst of all, they fail to see a disconnect between trying to get people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh kicked off the air and celebrating a bottom-feeding pornographer as a courageous defender of the 1st Amendment in The People vs. Larry Flynt.
Liberals will always go to the ramparts in defense of free speech, just so long as the subject under attack is female genitalia or Islamic terrorism and not conservative values or religious principles.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.
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