Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Mark Steyn says since so many of Hollywood’s anti-war flicks are box office bombs, maybe Mel Brooks is involved.
We’re all familiar with the famous plot of Mel Brooks’ The Producers: A wily impresario figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop musical, Springtime for Hitler. To date, Brooks has got a film and a show and a film-of-the-show out of this inspired idea. But, if he’s minded to go to the well a fourth time, he might like to modify the plot and make it the tale of a wily filmmaker who figures out an accounting scheme to make a fortune by producing the world’s all-time mega-flop anti–Iraq War movie.
Mark Cuban and Brian De Palma’s Redacted is not exactly Springtime for Saddam, but its flopperooniness is something to marvel at. In its first three weeks, the movie earned $60,456 at the box office. Which would be a disappointing take for your cousin’s summer-stock production of Brigadoon in a leaky barn theater in Maine, but is apparently a respectable haul for an award-winning motion picture ballyhooed for weeks on end in the national press. “The film traffics in, and clearly means to provoke, strong, unbalanced emotions,†declares A. O. Scott in his review for the New York Times. The strongest unbalanced emotion it provokes is a powerful visceral urge to say, “Well, I was thinking of going to the movies this weekend, but I figured I’d stay home and wash my hair.†…
David Warren has more Steyn defense.
… These days in Canada, if you’re feeling down and blue, and you think somebody hates you, you bring your case to a human rights tribunal. And the people you think hate you get that knock on the door, celebrated in the literature of the Soviet Gulag, and wherever else ideology triumphed over humanity in the 20th century’s painful course. Your daddy, your mommy, your brubber, or more likely some newspaper pundit gets dragged before a committee of smug, left-wing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators. After long delays that are costly only to the defendant and the taxpayer (justice delayed is justice denied), you will have the satisfaction of making your enemy squirm, in a kangaroo court where he is stripped of the right to due process, in which there are no fixed rules of evidence, in which the “judges” make up the law as they go along, and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations. …
… But to paraphrase the late Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the redneck trolls, and I did not speak out because I was not a redneck troll. Then they came for the male chauvinist pigs, and I did not speak out because I was not a male chauvinist pig. Then they came for Mark Steyn, and I did not speak out because I was not Mark Steyn. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.” …
Some shorts from John Fund.
Don Boudreaux thinks “sweet land of liberty” means petty local tyrants don’t get to run our lives.
… I’ve always understood the boast that America is a “sweet land of liberty” to mean that we Americans — each of us, individually — value our personal space and will tolerate no interference with our individual choices by anyone. As long as I accord others the same rights, I am free to do as I please. That, at least, is the ideal to which Americans traditionally aspire.
According the same rights to others means, of course, that I’m not free to punch my neighbor in the nose (unless he punches me first), take my neighbor’s car without his permission or rape his wife and daughters. I refrain from inflicting material harm on him and he reciprocates. It’s a wonderful arrangement.
Within the boundaries of this arrangement, neither my neighbor nor I am free to dictate the ingredients of each other’s diet or, more generally, each other’s lifestyle choices. I might be convinced — and correctly so — that my neighbor’s habit of smoking, eating lots of salt-encrusted trans fat-laden foods and sitting for hour upon endless hour watching television will likely shorten his life.
I can try to persuade him to make more healthful choices. But that’s it. In a free society, if my neighbor chooses to trade off longer life expectancy for greater gustatory or decadent pleasures, so be it. He is a free man. …
Ilya Somin with yet another example of the war on drugs interfering with the war against fundamental Islamofascists.
National Review shorts.