RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to Hollywood, investigations of Hollywood communists is one of the worst blights on America’s record. Over and over again, like a child picking a scab, Hollywood revisits the horrid days of McCarthyism. In The Majestic, Jim Carrey plays a writer dragged up before McCarthy on charges of communism; in The Way We Were, Barbra Streisand plays a Marxist whose politics damages her husband’s screenwriting career; in Good Night and Good Luck, Hollywood relived the saga of Edward R. Murrow attacking Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Tinseltown can’t get enough of reliving how the right supposedly violated its First Amendment principles in order to persecute the poor little Soviet fellow travelers who were throwing their weight around in the industry.

But when it comes to today’s liberals persecuting non-liberal thought in Hollywood, Hollywood doesn’t bat an eyelash.

Take, for example, director Kathryn Bigelow of Zero Dark Thirty. Bigelow is no right-winger – when she made The Hurt Locker, many on the right were upset at what they perceived to be an anti-military bias. But now, the left wants a full-scale awards season boycott against Zero Dark Thirty. Why? The movie depicts American intelligence utilizing harsh interrogation techniques – techniques harsher than those actually used – in order to obtain information about Osama Bin Laden.

This challenges the left’s contradictory view of torture: either torture is so brutal that its immorality outweighs the gains obtained, or torture doesn’t work at all. Bigelow’s film depicts brutal torture – placing terrorists in boxes, hanging people from chains, waterboarding with buckets – but it also shows that the intelligence gathered was valuable in finding Bin Laden. And Hollywood can’t handle that.

So actor David Clennon, who is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, launched a campaign to stop Zero Dark Thirty from receiving any awards. Wrote Clennon:

I’m a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Motion Picture Academy clearly warns its members not to disclose their votes for Academy Awards. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that the film Zero Dark Thirty promotes the acceptance of the crime of torture, as a legitimate weapon in America’s so-called War on Terror. In that belief, following my conscience, I will not vote for Zero Dark Thirty in any category … I cannot vote for a film that makes heroes of Americans who commit the crime of torture.

Now Clennon has been joined by Martin Sheen and Ed Asner. Sheen, who has long been an ardent leftist – President Josiah Bartlet! – says he opposes any awards for Zero Dark Thirty. Asner, who declared himself an open socialist long ago – even as he rakes in cash from voice work in films like Up! – said, “I would like to condemn the movie.” According to the press, both actors want voters to “factor in matters of conscience when casting awards votes.”

And yet Hollywood has no problem feting movies that excuse Nazism (The Reader), fete Communism (Reds), and create sympathy for pedophilia (Little Children).

While those in Tinseltown like to claim that their ultimate god is the almighty dollar – an odd defense from a group of folks who consider themselves to be leftists – the truth is that they are cause-driven ideologues. And it’s astonishing how little non-liberal content it takes to turn Hollywood against you. Originally, Zero Dark Thirty was slated to be a sycophant session for Obama as bin Laden-killer. Then it was great. But when Bigelow produced an accurate depiction of the role of enhanced interrogation techniques – even as a side point in the main story – the left turned on it. And then the left claims, ridiculously, that there’s no bias in Hollywood.

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