Playing Palin in the movie
It shouldn’t be Julianne Moore who is slated to play Palin in the movie:
It should be Mariska Hargitay:
[Hat tip: commenter at Althouse.]
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
It shouldn’t be Julianne Moore who is slated to play Palin in the movie:
It should be Mariska Hargitay:
[Hat tip: commenter at Althouse.]
“Do you like SEX, Mr. Lebowski?” ~Maude Lebowski
You’re so right!
A movie huh. Hollywood is nothing if not a bunch of plagiarists.
Julianne Moore looks like 68 vintage anti-war folk singer. Would she even have the guts to put a worm on a fishing hook?
I dread this movie. It’s going to make Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a sober, even-handed accounting. You just know it’s going to be a hatchet job of the first water, from the opening title to the closing credits.
As always, it would be interesting to see the shoe on the other foot.
Remember, it was the Left that made a movie lampooning George W. Bush… and another that cheerfully depicted his assassination. And now we see one about Sarah Palin.
What would have been the reaction to a hit-job movie about Hillary Clinton? (Actually, we know the answer to that one; the attempt to release “Hillary: The Movie” was fought up to the Supreme Court.) How about Joe Biden? (The Obamas, of course, are untouchable.)
My other thought is: what will Sarah Palin do about this? You know she won’t take it lying down.
The less like Sarah Palin the actress looks the better.
Remember “I can see Russia from my house”? If the character doesn’t look like Palin the less likely it will be for people to associate whatever BS they have her spout with the real deal.
Ummm guy, Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house”, that was said by Tina Fey on SNL. Palin said that you could see Russia from Alaska, which is a true statement. Google can be your friend.
One of the truly scary things about ha-has like SNL is they truly skew public perceptions. Anyone else remember Chevy Chase’s mocks of Gerald Ford as the klutz who couldn’t walk thru a door without hitting his forehead, who maimed people and property with his golfballs, who was near-spastic and thus brainless? SNL was hot then; everyone watched. I believe Chevy alone cost Ford millions of votes and enabled Jimmah’s election.
one else remember Chevy Chase’s mocks of Gerald Ford as the klutz who couldn’t walk thru a door without hitting his forehead, who maimed people and property with his golfballs, who was near-spastic and thus brainless?
Yeah. Nobody more klutzy and uncoordinated than an All-American athlete. Everybody knows that.
@David Avera
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Ignorant idiots don’t even know that Russia is just over a piece of water next to Alaska.
Where did they learn their US geography again?
I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie’s portrayal of Palin is so over the top that it generates sympathy for her. That was certainly the case with “W”.
Yeah, the leftists should remember their old buddy Henry Wallace going over to behold a Potemkin display at Kolyma and gushing about the superbridge of the future that would be built from Russia to Alaska.
They sure are good with the airbrush.
Well, I won’t be seeing the movie. I quit supporting the leftist entertainment establishment a long time ago.
The only thing I watch on TV is baseball, and while I saw Atlas Shrugged when it opened, the last movie before that I saw in a theater was Team America: World Police, which was a few years ago.
The internet provides all the information and entertainment I need, and there are also books.
Accept a few things. The left is never going to stop. The truth about almost any matter will never see the light of day. Socialism, then communism, the end game.
We have two choices.
McCarthy was right.
As the VENONA papers have demonstrated, and the growing number of admissions and writings by aging Communists approaching death, in which they have bragged about how they spied and worked for the Communist Party and Russia have confirmed, it is looking more and more like McCarthy was right and, perhaps, even seriously understated just how heavily infiltrated the U.S. government was by Communists.
I spent almost thirty years doing heavy duty research that allowed me to dig deeper into various contemporary issues and history than is common. If we picture how we view contemporary History and its landscape and signposts as consisting of a spectrum, with the opposite ends of that spectrum being the most radically different views of that history in terms of what is factual, what actually happened, how important what happened was, what the true state of affairs actually is and how that landscape looks, with the space between the two opposites filled with less radical interpretations of that History, I have to say that the more I learn, the closer and closer I move toward that end of the spectrum of interpretations and understandings of History that is the furthest from, and in opposition to, the pole and section of that spectrum that is the standard and accepted view of history as dictated by the MSM, conventional wisdom, and the Gentry class; a view that has changed radically over the years since WWII.
In my view there are almost two different interpenetrating worlds here.
For a good number of our citizens, they look at the landscape that has been created by the Left and that they have been told by the Left is real, and they see that they live in a world in which the United States is the great villain, the source of all the world’s ills. In the other polar opposite, as seen through a Conservative lens, the United States is the greatest force for good in the world.
In one world we are racists who interned hundreds of thousands of Japanese in WWII merely because we hated the innocent, brown-skinned Japanese and, for similar racist reasons, we continually “keep the black man down.” In the other world, one viewed through a traditional, conservative lens, after the disaster at Pearl Harbor, with our Pacific fleet decimated, us being attacked on a world-wide scale and the war going badly, and in view of the intelligence we had at the time, we had good reason to intern the Japanese, who in most other countries might have been much more brutally treated or even been, many of them, executed, Japanese whose leaders, from contemporary coverage of events right after Pearl Harbor, actually asked the government to protect and shelter them from growing incidents of retaliation.
In one world the Japanese were held in “concentration camps,” in another they were put into “relocation centers” that were not paradise, but in which they were not brutalized or forced to labor, were very well fed, clothed, and housed, had schools and churches, baseball teams and clubs, newspapers and better medical care than most Americans at the time, and many “internees,” college students for instance, were routinely released to attend college and, for some reason, it is never mentioned that many of these internees were hard core, fanatical supporters of Japan and the Emperor, and that tens of thousands of them were not U.S. citizens at all.
From their statements and writings, for the most part the actual internees stoically accepted that what happened to them was part of the “fortunes of war,” but their ever more Left leaders–the very same organizations that begged the government to shelter the Japanese from retaliation after Pearl Harbor–and the internees children and grandchildren, have rewritten history, “re-imagined” “relocation centers” into “concentration camps”, and wanted to be “get paid” and were.
Ideology and such “re-imagination” have created these two polar opposites.
Similarly today, with Guantanamo, we are either holding terrorists who, as “terrorists,” actually have no “rights” under the Geneva Conventions, and who could have been executed immediately upon capture, and have given them much better treatment than they are entitled to or deserve, or we have resurrected our old concentration camps again, so that we can again illegally and unethically persecute brown skinned people.
br549 and Wolla Dolbo have it exactly right. I have come to the same realization. Berkeley provided a head start on this by raising antibodies in me against leftism, but I hadn’t realized the extent of the problem until relatively recently, guided in part by Art’s reading suggestions (thanks, Art!), the VENONA decrypts, and revelations re dead or dying leftists (e.g., Cronkite, Zinn).
In some respects, the most alarming reading was Whitaker Chambers’s Witness, which describes inter alia the Party’s efforts to smear the apostate Chambers with the full gamut of canards and to defend the various comrades.
The chilling part was the realization that this has been going on for a long time, that the NY Times and WaPo (Chambers’ main tormentors) were in the bag for communism even back then, and the recognition that leftists’ use not only the the same tactics today, but the same stilted (and therefore utterly diagnostic) language.
Preach it. It needs to be said.
An example of the needed antidote:
Did you hear that ripping sound? Two liberal icons known by their silly stage names — Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X — have just been torn down from their sanctified perches thanks to a pair of massively researched but finally damning new biographies.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/05/029011.php
Curtis: I’ve written about Gandhi’s flaws before (see this, this, and this). But as far as the Gandhi bio by Joseph Lelyveld goes, the author himself makes it clear that although he’s alleging a close relationship between Gandhi and Kallenbach, he is not alleging it was actively homosexual.
That fits in with everything I know about Gandhi and his sexuality—the summary version is that he pretty much renounced it, although he did some very strange things along the way (such as sleep with young girls in the bed next to him to prove how celibate he was). Whatever may have been going on in the deepest recesses of his psyche I can’t say, but in terms of behavior I think those who allege the relationship was actively homosexual are engaging in sensationalism.
See this.
Very interesting. I’ve much enjoyed your posts on Gandhi.
I hope the issue of Gandhi’s sexuality doesn’t obfuscate the larger truths from becoming adopted. Ironic that Gandhi’s grandson should say, “How does it matter if the Mahatma was straight, gay or bisexual? Every time he would still be the man who led India to freedom.” The first statement is true. The second is not. And it would be ironic that Gandhi’s fanaticism would be denied while a rather useless dispute to determine his sexuality continued.
As Wolla Dalbo said, it seems that America has split into two camps that cannot communicate with each other. They have radically different visions for the country. One camp believes in the traditional America as envisioned by the founders, while the other considers that concept to be fundamentally flawed and wants to transform us into a socialist/collectivist state.
There is no possibility of compromise and reconciliation. One ideology will win and the other will lose. If the collectivists triumph, the aftermath will be a bloodbath, just as has happened everywhere else that poisonous ideology has held sway. That is why I continue to predict that civil war is in our near future.
P.S.–Another example of the two different worlds I wrote of above, of “disinformation,”
As I may have written before–excuse me if I repeat myself–from the research I have done, the “narrative” of the innocent and almost “saintly, ”about to surrender” Japanese, who we so senselessly and needlessly Atomic bombed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki–and strictly for political reasons, too–is a crock.
The Japanese were working–as were the Germans–on developing nuclear weapons, and, in fact, at least one academic researcher–probably at the risk of his career–wrote a book containing tantalizing evidence that the Japanese nuclear weapons research project–conducted in remote North Korea where the necessary massive quantities of hydro electrical power were available and where access to the test area could be easily controlled–were much more advanced than our MSM reported they were,for, in contemporary post-WWII newspapers, Americans were shown pictures of a few odds and ends of beat-up, antiquated, “mad scientist” type scientific equipment, and told that the Japanese atomic research effort–confined to theoretical studies in their universities–had not even advanced to a correct theoretical knowledge of the processes involved in the fission/fusion process, much less advanced to the practical business of actually obtaining a critical reaction, and then building an atomic bomb.
(I can’t help but be reminded of the initial reports from the military intelligence officer on the scene in 1947, Maj. Marcel, who after the newspapers were given a press release that stated that a downed “flying saucer” had been found, broken and scattered over a remote farm in Roswell New Mexico, and that it had been recovered “recovered,” only to change the story the next day to say that, in fact, a small “weather balloon” —complete with a show and tell sample of such a balloon, its picture printed in the newspapers along with his new story to illustrate his new “reframing” of the issue–had been mistakenly identified as a UFO. Several decades later, of course, Maj. Marcel recanted the “weather baloon” story he told the press, and said that there had, indeed, been an alien UFO that had crashed outside of Roswell, NM and was recovered by the Army Air Force.)
In any case, in the course of my research I found an obscure newspaper article that quoted the head scientist involved in this Japanese nuclear program, who said that, had Japan developed such a nuclear weapon, it would have unhesitatingly used it against us at the first opportunity. Needless to say, this “narrative” spoiling quote never made it into the MSM or, apparently, into the history books.
Then, there were the various atrocities committed by the Japanese, which were far more numerous, wide-spread, and far more barbaric that our newspapers and MSM reported them to be. So, for example, there was the Japanese Army’s almost 15 year program of uniformly lethal biological and chemical warfare experimentation on humans, again in cold, remote Manchuria by their “Unit 731” on an estimated 850 to as high as 10,000 humans, and many of them POWs–even at the low end estimate, many hundreds more humans experimented on without anesthesia and then cold-bloodedly and without mercy vivisected alive/killed in horrible ways than the Nazi’s famous Dr. Mengele and his crew ever experimented on and killed; we’ve all heard of Mengele but few, until the last few decades, had even heard of “Unit 731,” and very few even know about them today. In addition, there were the subsequent Japanese “field experiments” of the biological agents Unit 731 and other even more shadowy Japanese Army units, like Unit 100, developed from those experiments on humans, that Chinese researchers assert killed and/or sickened hundreds of thousands of Chinese, and even established several diseases alien to that country in China, where they remain a problem to this day. These things were simply just not reported–so they never “happened,” and it has only been in the last couple of decades that information about these experiments and their aftermath have started to surface.
My impression was that there was a general effort at the very end of the war and immediately after it by “clean-up crews”–both Japanese and American–to create a new “narrative,” to destroy, bury, or to “reframe” evidence of the extent of the involvement of the Emperor in planning, green lighting, and in the day to day planning and direction of the war, of the extent of Japanese atrocities, and the extent of various barbaric and/or threatening Japanese WMD and nuclear research efforts; a very successful effort to create an alternative history that served their purposes.
On the Japanese side, these efforts were made to protect the Emperor and the Imperial system from prosecution/destruction, to conceal the extent of Japanese atrocities and culpability, and to conceal the guilt of many of the individual Japanese and Japanese organizations/ businesses who committed/aided in these atrocities, or who profited from them. On the American side, it appears that this cleanup effort–this cynical exercise in “realpolitik”–was to enable us to not have to prosecute the Emperor as a war criminal as our leaders had vowed to do during the war, and to present a more benign Emperor and Japan that were not so un-redeemably guilty, fanatical, and bloodthirsty that we could not “work with them.” Moreover, it appears that such a “cleanup” was justified and the “atmosphere” it promoted was sought because it was argued that it would make our Occupation of Japan easier, and the Imperial Household and the Japanese people more willing to accept and to cooperate with it.
Thus, was created the “myth” of the Emperor as a retiring, myopic, gentle, scholarly and otherworldly little man–far too much a pacifist and obsessively focused on his studies of jelly fish and sea life to be interested in War, or to have played any decisive role or to have had any influence on the fanatical Japanese Imperialists/militarists–who were the ones who really plotted, pushed for, initiated, and prosecuted Japan’s war against us. The various Japanese atrocities were downplayed, buried in one way or the other, or just not mentioned by the MSM, a few military officers were tried and hung or imprisoned, a Japanese industrialist or two was raked over the coals, some lesser ranked members of the Imperial Household Agency–charged with the protection of the Imperial clan and the preservation of the Imperial system–stepped foreword to accept blame for various war crimes, and the knowledge of the role of the Emperor, these various war crimes and their details just faded away. That is why the Japanese–especially the guilt trip experts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki–can so easily play the moral superiority card against us today.
But make no mistake about it, in this instance at least, the history that is the generally accepted one is far different–is deliberately twisted and/or incomplete–compared to the history that actually occurred.
One wonders just how many other pivotal events in our History–contemporary and remote–have also been “cleaned up,” “re-imagined,” and “reframed.”
Another post I’m saving. Thanks WD.
Curtis–As the cherry on top of this mess.
Neither the Japanese Doctor, General Dr. Shiro Ishii, who conceived of and ran Unit 731 from start to finish and presided over perhaps as many as 10,000 horrific and agonizing deaths, nor any of those who those who staffed Unit 731 and helped him were even charged, much less prosecuted, and Ishii retired to Japan after the war, where he lived on a generous government pension, and continued his “medical experiments.” Many of the thousands of doctors and scientists who cycled through Unit 731 during its 15 years of existence–a large portion of the entire Japanese medical and scientific communities–went on to prominent positions in post WWII Japan, and, as of a few years ago, the dwindling number of ordinary soldiers who provided the “muscle” for the operation were still holding their annual reunion in Tokyo, where they, no doubt, talked over the “good old days.”
The mystery of lack of any prosecutions was explained a decade or so ago when our government finally admitted that, in exchange for his collection of scientific and medical records and autopsy slides detailing his horrific, excruciating, and lethal “experiments” on perhaps as many as 10,000 innocent human beings, and the data/results Unit 731 obtained, experiments that we would never do because of our “ethical and moral standards,” Gen. Dr. Ishii and his whole crew were given immunity from prosecution and, according to the article linked to below, even paid some amount of cash as well–I guess Dr. Ishii and Co. knew a good deal when they saw one (see, for instance, http://www.japanfocus.org/-Christopher-Reed/2177) .
It is precisely for the reason of disemboweling American intelligence capabilities that such things were outlawed and defunded; the CIA’s often noted and absent human intelligence resources.
In the 50s, military intelligence had not yet felt the restrictions.
The US military was not interested in BW capabilities as an offensive approach but as a defensive protocol for generating anti-BW procedures. There is no data on the effects to humans from radiation or bio/chem warfare without actually seeing the results. That would require observing US casualties, which was not a popular idea then or now. Thus when the opportunity came to obtain information appropriated by other people, the decision was easily made given the resources available. As part of the deal, the protection offered, regardless of what it was, was maintained.
These days it would never fly due to Wiki Leaks and all the traitors and leakers in the US bureaucracy and administration. One faction can promise the moon and its protection in return for information or intel, but come the next election or whenever a bureaucrat feels pissed off, that information will be leaked and the protection they were promised, erased.
This essentially means US cannot keep any useful allies, whether they be virtuous or not. Either because the foreigners cannot trust the word of the US government or because the foreigners are found and killed for cooperating with the US, like many Afghans were due to the information Wikileaks gave to the Taliban.
A signature move of Leftist domestic insurgencies is to demand reparation for things that happened in the past. There’s no proof that this will actually be the end of things. As we suspect the Left of having ulterior motives behind their call for reparations and apologies, so did American military officials suspect the Communist Chinese and the Communist Soviets of ploys. The Western media in 1950 was not yet corrupted by Leftist influence. But during the 60s it certainly started becoming infiltrated.
Why was there never word from the KGB to make this an issue? That’s not such an easy question to brush aside.
Judging the historical events in question, meaning what actually happened post WWII in Japan and using some of the MacArthur’s primary source testimony on Hirohito, I would have to say the Shouwa era, Hirohito’s reign name, was exactly was he portrayed it as.
The British and French wished for some show trials to show off their victory. It was a way to justify, to their own populations, who was right and who was wrong. The fact that this coincided with who actually was right vs wrong, was almost a coincidence. The American administration or the MacArthur occupation didn’t see that was either necessary or even desirable for the island nation of Japan. Since the British and French were not in charge of Japan, only Vietnamese colonies and Hong Kong, they didn’t get the final say.
Concerning camps for the Japanese in WWII, that was a decision made by the FDR Administration but carried out by lower functionaries. Thus it is as easy to blame the Leftist belief in authority and communist central planning (which FDR loved) as it was to blame America for concentration camps. Why the Left chose the later should be obvious. But the former is also an option.
In this case, the opposite of what the Left claims is not necessarily true. If the Left claims that the US was evil for concentrating Japanese in camps and forcing them to sell their property to carpetbaggers, it doesn’t mean FDR made the right choice. Those two are different probability branches. FDR could have made the right decision, given the circumstance, but carried it out using illegal or authoritarian and totalitarian means and goon squads. FDR could have made the wrong decision, but the camps were administered by those who made the right decisions, given the limitations they were under. Or you could have all combinations together.
That’s what happens when looking at a very long span of time involving many people.
Those that think this is something new, don’t be surprised. Southerners and pro Unions backers are still in the belief of the War of Northern Aggression, LIncoln was a tyrant, and Sherman was a warmonger of a war criminal.
This is not about history so much as it is about personal biases and whose side you are on.
Whose side you are on dictates your view of history and its outcomes.
Ymarsakar–
As for the incidents I have written about here on this thread, while it can be argued that “winners write the histories,” or that from each side’s perspective they were justified in doing what they did, I happen to think that all of these actions must and should be judged from a moral perspective.
Thus, for instance, I can see absolutely no way in which the vicious, barbaric, and horrific experiments done at Unit 731 can be morally justified; grabbing random people off the streets–which was apparently a regular MO of Unit 731 when they needed more experimental subjects, which they referred to as ”maruta” i.e. “logs,” and taking POWs and experimenting on them, and deliberately doing so without regard to the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War or their basic human rights, using the most sadistic, painful methods possible, including Unit 731’s routine vivisections of live prisoners without anesthesia, and ultimately killing them all, cannot in any way be justified, nor can their later use of the weapons they developed against the general civilian population in China be either.
If the Japanese wanted to create these weapons so badly they should have asked for volunteers from among the Japanese military itself to experiment on but, of course, they could not do this because they knew they would not get the numbers of volunteers they needed, and certainly could not have subjected them to the sadistic smorgasbord of treatments that they wanted to subject their “logs” to.
I am aware that the Japanese were not Christians, and subscribed to an entirely different moral code, nonetheless, we are required to evaluate and judge things–to discriminate Good from Evil–and by the Judeo-Christian standards of the West, and the morality and law that developed out of them, Japan’s BW experimentation program was totally wrong, not justifiable, and just plain “Evil,” with those working on it–particularly the medical doctors involved– using the cover of “the necessities of war” to indulge in their power and control games, and in their sadistic fantasies and impulses.
The question is not whether the Japanese though it moral or immoral. It was likely they were forbidden to do such to humans. They just didn’t consider foreigners human. Which is a very classic example of tribalism where central unity of culture is so strong that anyone else is seen as inferior to the point of being animals, not humans of equal or comparable worth.
The incident in question had already happened and what you describe is Japanese, Chinese, Soviet, and American reactions to it after the war was over. Once the war is over, then it is a matter of what is right or wrong for the nation in question, not a matter of morality unless morality benefits said nation. There is even an ideal to cover the pragmatic, which is the ideal of transforming enemies into friends. More of an American belief than anyone else’s, however.