Cold today, but merely cold. Nature did not add insult to injury, and for that I’m quiveringly grateful. Thank you, Master! Thank you for torturing me less!
If I were a leftist, my heart would go pitty-pat over this story (by way of the Thinklings). The guy who ran CleanFlix, a now-defunct service that served up sanitized versions of movies for family viewing, turns out to have been a p*rn merchant, and has been arrested for sex with underage girls.
The story doesn’t say whether he made any claim to be a Christian. And I’m not sure what the moral is—never do business with anybody until you’ve had a private investigator follow him around for a month? I remember an anecdote I read years ago, written by a guy who’d worked for a p*rn magazine. He once asked his boss, “What’ll I do with all these letters telling us we’re going to Hell?” And the boss replied, “Keep ‘em. Maybe we can sell them Bibles someday.”
But it’s a black eye for the pro-family movement, fairly or not. At least it’ll be spun that way.
Over at City Journal, Andrew Klavan has posted this tremendous, magisterial essay on the evolution of war films in American culture. You’ll want to take time and read this.
I’m going to stray into politics now, which I try to avoid within these precincts. However, I won’t be hyping any candidate, as you’ll see.
This morning I was listening to Laura Ingraham, as I generally do at work. She was criticizing some things fellow talker Michael Medved had said on one of the TV news channels last night.
“Now he’s saying,” said Laura, “that all the rest of us in talk radio are liberals!”
As proof she played a clip from the interview. In the clip, Medved said, not that the other talk show hosts (who generally oppose the candidacy of Sen. John McCain, whom he supports) were liberals, but that they were “thinking like liberals,” because they were (in his opinion) responding to McCain on an emotional rather than a rational level.
Laura apparently didn’t notice that her own response in fact demonstrated Medved’s point. She was making an emotional response to something she imagined Medved had said, rather than paying attention to his actual words and responding to them in a reasoned manner.
By the way, I’m not a McCain supporter. I admire the heck out of him for his Vietnam War service, and I respect his devotion to his principles. I’m just not sure what all of those principles are.
But conservatives ought to engage in reasoned, civilized discussion. Let’s leave the theatrical outrage over imagined insults to the other side.
Yeah, I’m with you here. I have never listened to Ingraham’s show. I think it’s on in my area. But it’s disappointing to hear the good guys talk this way. She probably should have pointed out something clear which McCain supports and she opposes, an issue about which she could argue, instead of citing Medved’s comment and decrying it.
So, you vote next Tuesday, don’t you? Who are you going to go for? Come on, you can tell us. And anyone else reading this, feel free to chime in with who you support in the primaries and be sure to give a reason, like you trust him, you agree with him on most issues, or you support his stance on clothing the shameless. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive and we won’t argue about it.
Unless you support Ron Paul. Then you’re delusional. Just kidding.
We caucus in Minnesota, alas, which is a real problem for me. I suspect I probably won’t have the nerve to go and talk politics in a strange place with strange people.
I think I would feel the same way. I’ve never had to caucus before.
We caucus in Iowa. I went and was able to cast a ballot for Fred Thompson when he was still in the race. I was for him because he and I agreed on every issue that I feel is important. I would encourage Lars to go. Being a fellow introvert (and that hurts as a pastor) it wasn’t so bad. I was able to sit in the back and talk with just a few people, some that I met that night. I let others do the campaigning. We listened and cast our ballots.
Klavan’s article makes a number of wonderful points, but I’d be curious to hear how he responds to the top-down treat of governmental intervention that formed so many WWII movies. (They literally had a list of requirements for war movies: racial equality must be shown, democracy must be visibly present, &c.)
Also, he fails to address one significant feature of both Vietnam and (more so) Iraq: the asymmetry of tactics and objectives that makes “victory” a very hard-to-define concept. I honestly think that if we were fighting against a single totalatarian force lead by a dictator rather than a series of smaller forces emerging organically from the society (largely in reaction to perceived American ‘imperalism’), leftist directors would find it a lot harder to make antiwar movies.
At the same time, the clearest evidence for bias is in the difference between WWII movies and WWII video games. Video games are much more market-driven, and as a result tend towards the far more populist appeal of heroism and self-sacrificing in national defense. (Indeed, the Halo series could easily be read as an allegory of the War on Terror, triumphantly focusing on the alliance between the human (read: American) Spartan and reasonable-minded alien (read: non-millitant Muslim).
I can’t agree about dictators and smaller forces. The Soviet Union was a top-down dictatorship. During the Cold War, Hollywood made anti-Soviet movies while the old moguls like Goldwyn and the Warners were running things. But as the new generation came in, the message became more and more, “there’s no real difference between us,” and “it’s all the fault of American militarism.” Hugo Chavez is a top-down dictator, and Hollywood adores him.
And today, as has been noted elsewhere, we’ve given Hollywood a war against almost everything they despise–religious fanaticism, sexism and homophobia. But they can’t get behind it, because suggesting that America is better than anybody else in any way is–let’s face it–blasphemy to them.
I would have voted for Fred too probably. It’s hard to say if his poor showing had remained as it was until next Tuesday if I would have vote for him anyway. As it is now, I will likely vote for Romney. I trust he will lead the country in the direction I believe it should go.