Hollywood leans so far left it can't even comprehend what the center looks like. Yet it has the power to influence what future skulls full of mush, as Kingsfield would say, think about the past.
A recent tv movie about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings was simply a paranoiac extremist's fictional nightmare. If such a flick had been made about a person of color on the left, the makers would've been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail as "racists" ("racist" being what is used by the pc crowd rather than the McCarthyists' "communist", though to the same effect).
The cheapjack rush job "The Contender" was supposed to parallel the Clinton impeachment, but in trying to preach to us that a public person's private life is none of our business, Hollywood sets up an ingenious double standard: if you're Clarence Thomas, your private life must be public record (so far, no movie has been made about the Robert Bork nomination; perhaps Hollywood hasn't quite been able to skate around the liberal senators getting Bork's "Blockbuster" tape rental record in a vain attempt to try to smear him -- and don't forget bringing up Oliver North's purchase at a lingerie store (which was for ballet costumes for his daughters!). A public figure's private life is no one's business to Hollywood . . . if that person is left of center. Otherwise, the public has a right to know, and Hollywood and the media have a duty to blurt out every detail.
Movies about Richard Nixon invariably portray him as a psychopath, whereas movies about JFK invariably portray him as messianic. When we finally forget the disgrace that was Clinton, who committed worse crimes involving the FBI and IRS etc. than Nixon, no doubt Clinton movies of the future will portray him as truly messianic, whereas Clinton his a political Jimmy Swaggart (only more sanctimonious).
The Tom Clancy book "The Sum of all Fears" is about middle-eastern terrorists; despite the timeliness of that material, the movie "SoAF" is about right-wing terrorists. We mustn't offend the Taliban or the PLO. But right-wingers don't need to be understood but shot on sight.
Which segues us into "The Day Reagan Was Shot", Richard Crenna's Reagan isn't bad, considering the number of Reagan-haters who must exist in Hollywood, but he isn't that important, either. But Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, and one of the most experienced and savvy men in Washington at that time, is portrayed as an out-and-out nut case, simply on the basis of one erroneous statement. The whole weight of the film, in fact, seems to be, not that the chief executive was gunned down by a movie fan, but the fact that the Republican secretary of state spoke out of turn. The Crisis of the movie is not that a Republican president was shot, but that a secretary of state, who was the highest ranking official in Washington on the spot, had a slip of the tongue. The antagonist if the drama wasn't a true nut case who tried to eliminate an overwhelmingly popular chief executive, but a made-up nut case in the administration.
The Hollywood double standard continues in real life and in the movies. When Jerry Falwell said American deserved 9/11, he was castigated; when Clinton said America deserved 9/11, his vapid outspokenness was praised as "courageous". If Hollywood ever makes a movie about the war on Terror the Taliban and Osama can rest easy: the antagonist will be Condi Rice or Colin Powell.
