Andrew Breitbart unloads on liberal Hollywood. A taste:

Awhile back there had been a dinner party at Arianna’s house. Meg Ryan, John Cusak, Nora Ephoron and David Geffen were there. Mr. Geffen had recently seen a documentary about Walmart. He was aghast at what an “atrocious” company it was.

“I guarantee you he has not applied his philosophy, his hatred towards a policy of ‘we won’t sell our stuff at Walmart because they don’t pay their employees $16.95 an hour or allow for unions.

“They throw around the term reactionary so lightly. But they’re the most reactionary people in the world – I’m telling you if I were single, I’m so cynical and I’m like the typical guy, if any of them were just lying there like the Maggie Gyllenhaals of the world, I wouldn’t. I’m like, ‘No!’ It would almost disgust me, because they couldn’t be more uninteresting if they tried.

“Tonight I talked to the Republican in Massachusetts that cast the final vote that allowed for gay marriage to happen, and to talk to him, and the thought process that he went through, and how proud he was and how his wife texted him five minutes before to say I’m so proud of you. And I’m sitting there and there’s a Republican next to him who’s worked for him as his legislative aide and this guy said, ‘Yeah and I was the one who did the signature drive that raised 315,000 signatures against what he was trying to do.’ OK? And there sitting they’re and they’re friendly with each other. And they’re like this” – he puts his fists together – “over something that’s so tectonic.”

“This is why I feel so comfortable in the conservative movement,” said Mr. Breitbart, who is 39, and a father of four children. “People are willing to agree to disagree. They’re willing to disagree on the fundamental issues of our time, argue about them, fight against each other and at the end of the day say, ‘Okay well we agree about these things and we disagree about these things.’ Compare that to the Hollywood left, they were on the forefront of dethroning Joseph Lieberman as the conscience of the senate. In 2000 he was the conscience of the senate and for disagreeing on one thing, he could not be more uniformly reviled by this group of people.

“I’m telling you they’re uninteresting, they’re vicious, they’re vitriolic, they’re really, really not good people. I’m willing to say that on the record. You could probe them scientifically and anthropologically and prove that they’re not good people. They’re not acting on sound judgement, and what they’ve done to those people that disagree with them, whether they be Leiberman democrats or Scoop Jackson liberals, whether they’re Blue Dog democrats – they’ve been shut out of the party as these people do cocaine off of everybody’s buttocks and tell everybody that they need to create a sustainable future. The level of hypocrisy, I go, I’ve seen Fellini movies where I feel like I’m watching Little House on the Prairie compared to these people.”

Filmmaker David Zucker (”Airplane” “Top Secret” “Naked Gun”) saw the error of his liberal ways a few years back. He made some funny campaign ads in 2004, and now he’s back with a feature.

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.)

LA Times: 

In Hollywood docudramas, when the phrase “miscarriage of justice” is employed, it usually applies to the film’s subject, not its creators.

But a new documentary called “Blocking the Path to 9/11,” to be given a screening tonight, makes the case that former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton have pressured television and studio executives into quashing the DVD release of ABC’s 2006 miniseries “The Path to 9/11.” The privately financed documentary argues that the Clintons, who decried the original miniseries as a right-wing hatchet job, are out to salvage their political influence and legacy at the expense of free expression.

The documentary, which will be shown to a sold-out audience at the Skirball Center, was produced by former KFI-AM talk show host John Ziegler and Citizens United, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative political group that emphasizes the importance of strong families, limited government and free enterprise.

Even before its network broadcast, “The Path to 9/11″ sparked fierce opposition from Democratic leaders, who called on Disney, which owns ABC, to cancel the program. While those attempts eventually failed, ABC conceded to last-minute edits to the $40-million, five-hour miniseries, which aired over two nights.

ABC-Disney is passing up sure profits by not releasing this on DVD. As as stockholder, I am irritated by that in itself.

Andrew Breitbart: 

Peter Bart, the powerful 76-year-old editor-in-chief of Variety, the industry’s daily bible, and co-host of AMC’s “Shootout,” didn’t challenge Mr. Voight on the facts, but classlessly recounted in his slightly trafficked blog a private conversation that allegedly occurred nearly 40 years ago:

“As a young production executive at the studio, I was trying to push ‘Love Story’ forward and joined colleagues in trying to interest Voight in the part. However, the more we prodded, the more reluctant he became. He finally blurted: ‘The character in this movie is a Harvard student. He’s bright. He reads books. I could never be believable as that smart young guy.’

Mr. Bart - desperately attempting to be as cruel as possible - wrote, “Reading Voight’s op-ed piece these many years later, I realize how right he was.”

His message to Mr. Voight: You’re dead. Hollywood never forgets.

Nor does Google: Seven years ago, Mr. Bart was suspended for 21 days and underwent diversity training for making racist, sexist and homophobic comments.

“I was quoted making several statements to a Los Angeles Magazine reporter that do not reflect my personal beliefs and values or the way that I run the newsroom. Nevertheless, I am deeply sorry and regret that they offended anyone. It will not happen again,” Mr. Bart said in a written statement.

He returned to work Sept. 10, 2001, a reason many forget this insider dish.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forming of a media consensus. The new media - quick to spot a partisan-based old media railroading - struck back and defended Mr. Voight.

Dominant center-right blogs like Instapundit, Slate’s Kaus Files (fine, Mickey, “neo-liberal”) and Powerline, removed from the corrupting junkets, premieres and swag-heavy lifestyle of Hollywood journalists, pointed to Mr. Wells and Mr. Bart’s “Deliverance”-inspired journalistic behavior.

Mr. Wells - whose unsolicited anti-GOP mass e-mailings have reached my inbox in previous election cycles - responded by doubling down:

“It’s been said in this town many times that the right has a debt to pay for the blacklisting of lefties in the ’50s, and that in all fairness it’s probably going to take a long time to make amends. The fact is that the philosophical grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today’s right-wingers ruined the lives of many Hollywood screenwriters in the ’50s, and so their descendants now have to suffer and make up for that,” Mr. Wells wrote in his Hollywood-Elsewhere blog.

Jeffrey, are you aware that Bobby Kennedy was McCarthy’s right-hand guy? Or that many Democrats and Republicans were concerned about the verifiable infiltration of Soviet spies into our government and cultural organs? Or that, as Mr. Voight points out, commies were actually mass murderers greatly deserving of our vigilance?

And while I’m at it, will my great-grandchildren point to this incident in 50 years when they attempt to thwart the livelihoods of your progeny? In your mind, do two wrongs make a right?

Those who argue that Mr. Wells’ point of view is not representative of a larger mind-set among the Hollywood elite should think back to 2005, when Barbra Streisand publicly canceled her subscription to the Los Angeles Times for the crime of hiring a conservative to pen editorials a few times a week. That writer, Jonah Goldberg, went on to write the book “Liberal Fascism,” which hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Perhaps the title resonated with the masses.

For four-plus decades, Hollywood has cranked out films and TV shows decrying the victims of the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist: writers and actors believed to be Communists at one time or another who were refused work by a fearful film industry.

Each of those productions bears the stench of moral vanity, suggesting that the enlightened entertainment industry of today could never behave so badly. Who, moi?

Andrew Breitbart writes:

“There is no such thing as a blacklist anymore,” George Clooney declared in 2005 while promoting his black-and-white hagiography of Edward R. Murrow, “Good Night, And Good Luck.”

…”For anybody who would blacklist you,” party spokesman Clooney said, elaborating on Hollywood’s clean bill of health, “there are 50 people that would hire you now.”

Even while Mr. Clooney contradicts his bold statement that there is no blacklist in Hollywood (apparently because only a small minority practices it), he basically gets it right.

For ignoring the crimes of brutal dictators while ripping our democratically elected president during a time of war, Mr. Clooney probably wouldn’t be hired by one Hollywood producer - and I think I know him. And he wouldn’t hire Vanessa Redgrave, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Woody Harrelson, Jessica Lange, John Cusack or Danny Glover, either. Bias happens.

The problem occurs when the 50-to-1 ratio is flipped and Mr. Clooney and his allegedly egalitarian allies are doing most of the hiring. Remember his pal Julia Roberts’ slurs against Republicans? “Repugnant” Reaganites and “reptilian” Bushies planning to work on the “Ocean’s 14″ set have mastered a code of conduct: silence.

Whoops. Jon Voight broke the silence with an oped in the Washington Times and dared criticize Barack Obama. Now he’s on a list.

Jeffrey Wells writes:

My honest deep-down reaction is that I now have a reason to feel negatively about the guy. I’m not saying Voight is on the HE shit list (although the idea certainly feels good — just as it felt good to imagine the same thing last spring about Tina Fey when she became a rabid Hillary person on SNL), and I certainly don’t think a symbolic condemnation along these lines would matter much to anyone. Nonetheless, it’s going to be hard henceforth not to think of Voight as some kind of diseased wingnut.

I’ll always admire and respect Voight’s better performances (Luke in Coming Home, Reynolds in Enemy of the State, Ed in Deliverance, Howard Cosell in Ali, Manny in Runaway Train, FDR in Pearl Harbor, Jack in Desert Bloom, Paul Serone in Anaconda). And he’s obviously entitled to say and write whatever he wants. But it’s only natural that industry-based Obama supporters will henceforth regard him askance. Honestly? If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn’t pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, “Voight? Let him eat cake.”

Sunday debuted Generation Kill, a miniseries based on the book by the same name. From David Simon and Ed Burns, of HBO’s The Wire, I hoped for something good.

Blogger Democracy Project has collected opinions about the show. These range from media interviews to comments left on Amazon from actual Marines in the unit the book described. An excerpt:

The following is written without having read the book or seen the film. Instead, these comments come from a serious Internet search of participants and of observers of the events and of the book and film, from my own Marine Corps experience, and conversations with other Marines.

In brief, the HBO film has an air of authenticity, although some of the events it depicts are incorrect. It is a gritty portrayal of the danger and chaos faced by these Marines, and of some of their good and less good actions and reactions. Marines, and others, who have been in combat will recognize that films, even when not hostile, tend to overdramatize and to exaggerate. The book and film are not untypical. It’s not seen as a hatchet-job, but imperfect, and in some ways misleading, particularly as it describes the leadership as incompetent.

INSERT: This is a long post, one of its points being that the errors and emphasis in this miniseries will feed a negative view of our actions and mission in Iraq. A reviewer for the Washington Post (not the one cited and quoted in the post’s ending excerpts) makes this clear:

Wright and the filmmakers know it is not enough to say that war is hell or that war is evil. The point here also seems to be that war is stupid, this one more so than many others, and that the higher one goes in the hierarchy of command, the stupider the commanders tend to be.

For those without combat background, or views hostile toward our military or the war in Iraq, there’s surely much to give them confirmation of their views. But, otherwise, there is an underlying reality: We choose and train our best and bravest to be brutal as needed to stand between us and those even more brutal. If we desire to personally face those enemies’ brutality, then disparaging our defenders is the way to do it. (INSERT: Slate’s reviewer says of the recon Marines, “the characters here, more often than not, amount to cretinous psychopaths.” )

A documentary currently airing on HBO concerns the case of Roman Polanski, who had sex with a 13-year old girl and fled the country. The documentary details Polanski’s tragic life — losing his parents to the Nazis, his wife to Charles Manson — and the milieu in which the story played out.

The judge was a bit star struck and overly concerned about the press — at one point, he asked a reporter  in private what sentence he ought to give. To the extent that he broke his word with Polanski and his attorney, Polanski can be regarded as aggrieved.

But the documentary glosses over the essential villainy of what Polanski did. He now lives in Paris and is highly respected, even winning an Oscar a few years back. Hollywood people refer to him as living “in exile.”

Again, we bring you the sordid details. Stop reading if blunt language offends you. Here is the story, right from the transcript:

At age 43, Polanski invited a 13-year old girl to pose for a photo spread in French Vogue magazine. He shot her one day, then invited her back for a second round. He fed her champagne and a Quaalude, got her to remove her top, then photographed her in the jacuzzi (this happened at Jack Nicholson’s home when no one else was there).

Polanski got naked and joined her in the jacuzzi. She got uncomfortable and lied that she had asthma and needed to go home to get her medicine. Instead of heeding her request, Polanski got her into a bedroom and went down on her. In the transcript, she called this performing “cuddliness” (she meant cunnilingus) and she describes herself as “ready to cry.”

Then he penetrated her vagina. After a while, he inquired about her last period, and apparently deciding there was a risk of pregnancy, he decided to “go in through her back.”

If anything, the documentary demonstrates how times have changed. No 43-year-old would be able to plea bargain his way out of that. He’d be a pedophile doing time and then put on a list of sexual predators.

Thus spake actor John Cusack: 

Maybe George Bush does think God talks to him, but I don’t know what version of Jesus Christ he could pray to that could endorse war as a choice. To me, growing up Catholic, that’s obscene. But you think, “Why would they do that? It’s so shocking that the administration views the whole idea of government and war itself as a for-profit business.”

It’s shocking that someone could reach adulthood (Cusack) and still possess such a bigoted and juvenile world view, and get a chance to share it with the world.

“Everything is outsourced; everything is for profit,” the 42-year-old actor-writer-director said recently in an interview at his Venice production office. “I don’t think people really understand that. Corporations have privatized the war to the point where the war itself is the cost-plus business. They are hollowing out the very core function of what it means to be a government. They’re using the State Department as an ATM.”

Apparently Cusack thinks the military must do everything for itself, lest it buy something from the private sector, which then earns a profit. For years, our military had soldiers working in kitchens — KP or kitchen patrol — was the name for the dreaded duty. (Check out Beetle Bailey.)

Then it got smart and decided it was more economical to outsource such labor — why waste soldiers’ time for that?

“What we have here is a protectionist racket for the government’s favorite corporations to make money off the war,” said Cusack, who relied heavily on the writings of journalist Naomi Klein, author of “Baghdad Year Zero,” in making the movie. “Where are companies like Blackwater held to any conceivable check and balance that I learned in civics class?”

Checks and balances pertain to the three branches of government, not government contractors. Cusack needs to brush up on that civics class.

Cusack probably means Halliburton as a “favorite corporation.” Halliburton provided similar services to the military in the Balkans under Bill Clinton.

George Clooney, like many Hollywood face-men yearns to be taken seriously for his mind. So he puts out “deep” movies like Goodnight and Good Luck and Syriana.

Think he’ll do one about the Oil for Food scandal? The UN peacekeepers raping children in Africa? Nah.

Claudia Rosett writes about his new gig shilling for the UN:

As Hollywood buffs and UN money-raisers already know, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has just named actor George Clooney as the UN’s newest Messenger of Peace, with a “special focus on UN peacekeeping.” Clooney, currently visiting Sudan, is expected to “receive his designation” Jan. 31st at UN headquarters in New York.

This would all be great if UN peacekeeping actually produced peace. But the illusion that the UN is a grand force for good in this world deserves to be catalogued somewhere between World’s Most Amazing Scams and Believe It-Or-Not Best-in-Special-Effects. The reality of today’s UN is more like a cross between “Animal House” (the movie, with John Belushi) and “Animal Farm” (the book, by George Orwell). Libya and Vietnam have just joined the Security Council, where China and Russia hold permanent seats. The Organization of the Islamic Conference has turned the General Assembly into its Manhattan clubhouse — which Iran’s mushroom-cloud-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now uses every September as a base to parade around New York and lecture his audiences that Iran is a country of peaceful intentions and no homosexuals.

The Human Rights Council, with the eager help of Libya and Pakistan, is busy planning a “Durban II” reprise of its 2001 Durban I hate-fest against Israel and America. There is still no official UN definition of terrorism (which means that by UN lights, the Sept. 11 attacks were not committed by terrorists). And with assorted federal investigations going on in the U.S. into bribery, visa fraud and money laundering emanating from the UN (so, really, why did the UN Development Program in North Korea have $3,500 in counterfeit $100 bills in its office safe?), Ban Ki-moon — erstwhile chief administrator of the place — has been busy running around in a ski parka, and importuning on Bali, in his top priority campaign for massive transfers of wealth from democratic countries to dictatorships such as Cuba, China and Sudan, in the name of waging war on the weather.

The LA Times Kenneth Turan reviews a new documentary about the trial of Roman Polanski.

“Everyone thinks Polanski fled because he was afraid of going to jail, but people don’t know the real story,” the engaging, articulate Zenovich says. “That can only be told by the people who experienced it.” She quotes David Dalton, Polanski’s attorney, who says, “Only three people know the story and one of them is dead.”

Story? The film does not deal with Polanski’s guilt.

With its spotlight clearly on the judicial aftermath, “Wanted and Desired” does not focus on what happened between Polanski and the girl past putting both their statements to the police on the screen as type. That sex took place is not in dispute, and Zenovich, who says “if it was a violent rape I wouldn’t have made this film,” calls it “a tragedy for all involved. It’s not for me to judge.”

Here is what Polanski did, and you can read the victim’s testimony for yourself .

The “teenager” was 13 years old. Polanski got her drunk, then sodomized her. But he wasn’t violent about it.

The teenager’s troubling–and contemporaneous–account of her abuse at Polanski’s hands begins with her posing twice for topless photos that the director said were for French Vogue. The girl then told prosecutors how Polanski directed her to, “Take off your underwear” and enter the Jacuzzi, where he photographed her naked. Soon, the director, who was then 43, joined her in the hot tub. He also wasn’t wearing any clothes and, according to Gailey’s testimony, wrapped his hands around the child’s waist.

The girl testified that she left the Jacuzzi and entered a bedroom in Nicholson’s home, where Polanski sat down beside her and kissed the teen, despite her demands that he “keep away.” According to Gailey, Polanski then performed a sex act on her and later “started to have intercourse with me.”

At one point, according to Gailey’s testimony, Polanski asked the 13-year-old if she was “on the pill,” and “When did you last have your period?” Polanski then asked her, Gailey recalled, “Would you want me to go in through your back?” before he “put his penis in my butt.” Asked why she did not more forcefully resist Polanski, the teenager told Deputy D.A. Roger Gunson, “Because I was afraid of him.”

When friends urge me to see Charlie Wilson’s War, I say I’m suspicious of any pro-war movie coming from the likes of Aaron Sorkin and Mike Nichols.

It’s purports to tell a true story. Does it?

I’m an historian, not a film critic.  My objective here is to show where the movie is inaccurate — at times, woefully so.

Simply put, the movie vastly exaggerates the influence of Charlie Wilson at the expense of individuals who were equally or even far more influential, and who somehow are not mentioned whatsoever — a gross, intentional, and rather shameless oversight.

Here’s the situation: The movie, and the book, is about a moderate-to-conservative Democratic Congressman, a profane, hard-drinking, womanizing, anti-communist politician who was indeed — as the movie makes abundantly clear– very important to providing a huge amount of covert financial and military support to the Mujahedin rebels who resisted the Soviet Union after the Red Army invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The USSR brutalized the nation and its innocent people.  Charlie Wilson’s goal was to give the Afghan “freedom fighters” the supplies they needed to defeat the Soviets.

While all of this is true, this is (at best) half the story — maybe even a quarter of the story. It helps explain what happened in the Democrat-controlled Congress, where the likes of Charlie Wilson were a godsend to counter the San Francisco Democrats and Massachusetts liberals who would have let Central America become a Soviet-Cuban outpost.

But the rest of the story, which receives no mention, is that it was the Reagan administration, and specifically CIA director Bill Casey, National Security Adviser Bill Clark, Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger, and Ronald Reagan himself — plus numerous aides — who were the driving force behind supplying the Mujahedin. This movie could have been made 10 years ago about Bill Casey, whose actions were even more dramatic than Charlie Wilson’s — albeit not as obscene — or about Bill Clark. 

It is an obvious reflection of the liberal biases of Aaron Sorkin and Mike Nichols — and the CBS News / “60 Minutes”-affiliated staff-that Casey, incredibly and unforgivably, is not referenced even once. This is an outrage, and yet another stunning example of how liberals in Hollywood literally create their own fictional versions of history, totally airbrushing conservatives they never liked and forever refuse to credit even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The movie-makers don’t seem to realize, nor care, that this undermines their overall work — including the parts that have merit. Their lack of fairness works against them.

Ironically, conservatives have been fair in telling this story. For instance, in a book where I laid out the Reagan administration strategy of funding the Afghan rebels, I paused to shoehorn in a paragraph acknowledging the input of Charlie Wilson and his sidekick, Gust Avrakotos, who is portrayed colorfully in this movie by Philip Seymour Hoffman. My editor suggested that I remove the paragraph, but I argued that it was crucial — even ethical — to give credit where credit is due, even when editorially awkward.

This movie isn’t nearly so fair-minded. In one maddening scene, Charlie Wilson asks Gust Avrakotos about America’s strategy in Afghanistan. “Well, strictly speaking, we don’t have one,” says Avrakotos, “but me and three others are working on it.”

For those dispute that Hollywood is Democrat and liberal:

ON desks all over Hollywood, there’s a note this morning waiting to be sent:

Memo to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: We think you’re aces. Really. And we love your husband. But we’re running off with Sen. Barack Obama. Hope you understand. It’s all about being part of history. We’ll do lunch after the inauguration.

Of course, in certain Westside mansions, loyalty to the Clintons runs deeper than any primary result. But in a town that for many months has been divided by head and heart, a lot of entertainment industry people who chose Clinton because she was the smart choice, the “inevitable” Democratic candidate, are going where their hearts have long wanted to take them — to a place on the Obama bandwagon (and nobody wants to miss the last seat).

From the beginning, Hollywood has loved Obama’s story — his “pitch” as they say — but were wary of his real box office potential. Iowa and now possibly New Hampshire have lifted that uncertainty. The only thing the town likes better than a great story is a winning one.

Phones started ringing even before the junior senator from Illinois had completed his Iowa victory speech, which hardened political pros compared to legendary addresses given by the Kennedys, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Ronald Reagan. West of La Cienega, the clips on cable news were the best audition tapes anybody had seen in a long time.

If Clinton loses in New Hampshire tonight, predicted longtime political operative turned Hollywood producer Brian Quintana, Hollywood “will defect to Barack in droves.”

Hey, isn’t there an elephant in the room? Y’know, the GOP?

Funny how the only pro-war movie to emerge from Hollywood in a long time glorifies a Democrat. Investors Business Daily strips away the BS.

If you think Hollywood’s idea of a Christmas movie being one about the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan is strange, even stranger is the plot line. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which opened Friday, manages to reduce the president who won the Cold War to a background footnote.

Charlie Wilson was a pro-abortion, Equal Rights Amendment-supporting congressman widely known as “the liberal from Lufkin.” To his credit, he did play a role in facilitating support to the Afghan mujahadeen. But it is he who should be the historical footnote.

In his book, “Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” Lou Cannon notes how Reagan “expressed revulsion of the brutal destruction of Afghan villages and such Soviet policies as the scattering of mines disguised as toys that killed and maimed Afghan children.” He did not need much convincing to aid the Afghan resistance.

Cannon credits Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle and CIA Director William Casey with allaying any concern that providing Stinger missiles to the mujahadeen might lead to the missiles’ capture and copying by the Soviets. Also involved, says Cannon, was a bipartisan coalition “led by Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson in the House and New Hampshire Republican Gordon Humphrey in the Senate.”

So you have at least five players, including Reagan, involved — four of them Republican conservatives. Ikle notes: “Senior people in the Reagan administration, the president, Bill Casey, (Defense Secretary Caspar) Weinberger and their aides deserve credit for the successful Afghan covert action program, not just Charlie Wilson.” So guess which one Hollywood makes a movie about?

The movie is based on the book by former “60 Minutes” staffer George Crile. Crile’s credits include the infamous 1982 CBS documentary alleging that Gen. William Westmoreland led a conspiracy to mislead America about the Vietnam War. The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin of “West Wing” fame.

Mark Cromer:

WHAT’S the difference between an illegal immigrant on a job and a “scab” that crosses the picket line? After all, aren’t both merely seeking work where they can find it? Aren’t both willing to toil at a lower wage in an effort to feed their families?

The difference - at least in the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America - is Hollywood liberalism and the bicoastal 213/212 area code universes that ideologically feed it.

For what the strike by the WGA has revealed yet again is that outrage among the Los Angeles-Manhattan intelligentsia over corporate greed, unfair labor practices, stagnating wages and vanishing job security is directly related to the income and education level of those threatened.

Consider for a moment the hundreds of thousands of American workers in California alone who have been forced from jobs in construction, landscaping, auto-body repair, cable installation and a host of other jobs by an alliance of greed-driven employers and an ethnocentric lobby that’s hungry for demographic power.

These aren’t crop-picker or dishwasher jobs that Americans allegedly won’t do, but rather entire skilled and semi-skilled industries that have provided the butter and bread for the working class table.

Where is the outrage within Hollywood’s fabled “Thirty Mile Zone” for these displaced workers?

Burt wrote an oped for the LA Daily News about the writer’s strike:

I’VE been a member of the Writers Guild of America for nearly 40 years. That means that during the first two decades of my TV writing career, I was on strike just about every three years. But the last time we struck was in 1988. That one lasted almost six months. It hurt the TV networks because they lost viewers they never got back. It hurt writers because most of us aren’t wealthy, and it’s difficult to go that long without earning a living. It even harmed people who aren’t in show business, but whose livelihoods depend on those who are.

There’s not a lot of sympathy for our side because most think we’re a bunch of overpaid hacks and most think they could do what we do better if only they had decided to fritter away their lives on such tomfoolery.

The fact is that most of the 12,000 members of the Guild are living hand-to-mouth because only a small percent of that number manage to sell a script or get a writing gig in any given year.

Until last Monday, it had been 19 years since I walked a picket line. Moreover, it had been about 35 years since I walked one at the CBS Studio Center on Radford Avenue in Studio City. Back then, I worked for Talent Associates, an independent production company responsible for the Rock Hudson-Susan St. James series, “McMillan & Wife.”

Mainly because I haven’t had much of a TV writing career once I foolishly turned 50, and partly because the majority of its 12,000 members only joined the WGA during the past 10 or 15 years, I didn’t recognize a single face when I signed in for picket duty the other day. It seems that the Guild had underestimated the turnout. By the time I arrived, they had run out of picket signs. Still, I was assigned to join my fellow Guild members at the corner of Radford Avenue and Ventura Boulevard. I was undeniably self-conscious. It’s hard to feel more redundant than picketing without a picket sign, but in for a penny, in for a pound. So off I went.

There was a group of seven or eight fellows huddled by the stoplight and I decided I’d mingle there. At least they all had picket signs and I figured if I stood near them, it wouldn’t be as obvious that I didn’t. The last thing you want to look like at my age, after all, is a writers’ groupie.

However, as I approached, the group all began to chant, for reasons I can’t imagine, “We’re queer and we’re here!” While undeniably catchy, they’re probably not the words to put a chill in the heart of management. Still, they were enough to make me veer off at the last second. After standing around for about 15 brain-numbing minutes, I was on the verge of taking off when some busybody handed me his sign. Soon, one of the picketers suggested we split up into two groups, half of us crossing the boulevard. Then every time the light turned red, each group crossed the street in opposite directions. That at least gave us a sense of purpose beyond just standing around looking as if we were picketing the Samuel French Book Store.

Read it all.

Ed Driscoll:

As I noted at the start of the month, Hollywood has, over the last decade or so (in other words, prior to 9/11, or even George W. Bush taking office) adopted a remarkably nihilistic view of America’s involvement in war–any war, whether it’s Iraq, the War On Terror, or even World War II. The latter is all the more remarkable, considering WWII was long thought to be “the Good War” by virtually all concerned–partially because it had the blessings of the left, happy that we stopped the Soviet Union’s former ally, Nazi Germany. Nearly a decade ago, Mark Steyn documented the first signs of the change in Hollywood’s souring on WWII in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan:

Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks’s sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they’ll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess’.

Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing’. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing’. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing’. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

But Hollywood is clueless about this. Yesterday’s LA Times wrote about the woes of the “serious” film biz.

Why haven’t more people shown up to see “A Mighty Heart,” “In the Valley of Elah” or even the comedy “Lars and the Real Girl”? Some films — like Richard Gere’s “The Hunting Party,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Sleuth” or the Mark Ruffalo-Joaquin Phoenix film “Reservation Road” — haven’t made even $1 million. And a crew of classy star vehicles from studios — essentially art films with bigger budgets — has been flailing at the box office.

Despite George Clooney’s tub-thumping, “Michael Clayton” has earned only $21 million. Cate Blanchett’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” has taken in $11 million, and the Brad Pitt western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” has earned only $2 million, according to Boxofficemojo.com.

Many of those got bad or so-so reviews, so where’s the mystery? Execution of serious dramas must be spot-on or they flop. Unlike mass-audience genre pictures like The Game Plan, which can score big even while mediocre.

This is nothing new.

As for Elah and Clooney’s latest anti-capitalist spew, who wants to shell out money to hear Hollywood’s primitive worldview?

Schamus thinks there is “the same finite amount of appetite for depressing films as we’ve always had, but that appetite is being serviced by so many options on the menu that it’s difficult to make a choice.” He jokes, “In two years, as a result of this fall, there will be not one single drama on the slate. The market will be flooded by lousy comedies and consumers will be howling with disappointment.”

Despressing isn’t the point. Quality is. Little Children  or The Squid and The Whale might be considered depressing, but both were examples of great filmmaking.

George Clooney’s got a new movie bashing capitalism, the teat on which he suckles.

Glenn Whipp, reviewing it in the Daily News writes:

The movie, written and directed by Tony Gilroy (writer of the three “Bourne” movies), isn’t all that complicated, features a couple of rather enormous gaps in logic and its ending can be seen a mile away.

Gaps in logic? Pray tell.

None of that matters because it’s a great exercise in wish fulfillment that taps into our ever-increasing disgust over unregulated corporate profiteering.

Such are the juvenile views engendered in the cloistered worlds of journalism and Hollywood. One wonders where corporations go unregulated. Here in the US, they spend millions a year dealing with government regulations.

Or does Whipp think profits should be regulated? If so, does that mean:

• The founders of Google should give back some of the billions they earned?
• Kobe Bryant, Peyton Manning etc. should give have their salaries slashed?
• George Clooney should only make X times what the grip on his movies makes?
• Oprah should give back some of the $260 million she earned last year?

No, no. The evil corporations are those providing gasoline, drugs and food — y’know, the nonessentials.