Redford disses Mormons

[_harmony]

Hollywood? My understanding is that Redford has very little to do with Hollywood at all. Where do you get that idea from?

Same place he gets many of his ideas: where the sun doesn't shine.

[_harmony]

/says the active Mormon Romney-hater

What do you have against Romney?

[_Babblonian]

/says the active Mormon Romney-hater

What do you have against Romney?

Can't stand his hair.


No, actually, he's the embodiment of every glad-handing, wanna-be-GA, talk-out-of-both-sides-of-your-mouth Stake President you've every had, all rolled into one smarmy package with perfect teeth. When he was governor, he was at least interesting and somewhat nuanced in his approach to social issues. But when he decided to run for the nomination and had his neo-con awakening, I lost all respect for the man.

He makes me glad that the Church has officially denounced the white horse prophecy. Although truly, if ever there was a time when the constitution hung by a thread...

[_Coggins7]

I have to take this at face value. I've never met anyone with more experience with having a cartoonish understanding of most topics than Coggins, which pretty much makes him an expert on the subject, at least, in a cartoonish kind of way.

Coming from someone who has never contributed a single bloody thing to any serious discussion in this forum that's quite a statement.

[_Coggins7]

At least he has a semblance of an understanding of those he disagrees with. . . as opposed to someone who's post I'm replying to.

Its actually difficult to disagree with someone who spends much of his waking life in worlds other than the real one. But we all have our crosses to bear...

[_Jason Bourne]

hana

For the record, Redford also called Mitt Romney a "faceless jerk" (as noted in the Boston Herald's Inside Track).

Does that make Redford a bigot?

No, as long as he does not say it JUST because Romney is Mormon.

It does, however, make Redford stupid.

[Dr. Sunstoned]

Liars for Lambs

By Debbie Schlussel
DebbieSchlussel.com | 11/12/2007

Benjamin Disraeli--and later Mark Twain--said there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. But today, there are lies, damn lies, and anti-war movies.

The latest didactic, silver screen mythology emanating from Hollywood is "Lions for Lambs," starring (and directed by) Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep, and in theaters now. The film's rewriting of history and Middle Eastern religious dynamics is disturbing. And its statements about our military and alleged racism are unconscionable.

As Americans get more and more of their "history" from on-screen fiction, the fairy tales this film puts forth are dangerous in their blatant falsehood.

A constant theme throughout this boring movie is that American military and political leaders--a smug, right-wing caricature, Republican Senator played by Cruise and an Army commander played by Peter Berg--maintain that Sunnis and Shi'ites are working together against American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is something neither soldiers nor a liberal TV reporter played by Streep can believe.

Streep's Janine Roth and two soldiers on whom the movie focuses constantly question this allegation as utterly preposterous. Reporter Streep tells Senator Tom Cruise she can't believe that after centuries of fighting each other, Sunnis and Shias are suddenly working together against us.

The purpose of this constant on-screen ridicule of the notion of a Sunni-Shi'ite alliance against the West is to ridicule the Bush Administration's positing of the same regarding Iraq. But, it's not ridiculous at all.

Reality check: Sunnis and Shias have worked together against their common enemy--the West--for decades. That the movie questions this fact as preposterous is, well . . . preposterous. Here are just some of the many instances in which the two religious sects have, indeed, worked together in terrorist operations and plots against America:

* Intelligence reports and eyewitness accounts from the 1983 Hezbollah (Sh'ite) bombing of the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut state that P.L.O. (Sunni) operatives machine-gunned and shot at Marines as they tried to flee the barracks.
* Yahya Ayyash, HAMAS' chief bombmaker who was known as "The Engineer" (and was a Sunni), received much of his bombmaking training from Hezbollah (Shia) in Lebanon. He repeatedly worked with Hezbollah for years before he was assassinated by Israel in 1996.
* The June 1998 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia was a joint Al-Qaeda (Sunni)/Hezbollah (Shia) operation.
* In October 2005, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that evidence ties Al-Qaeda insurgent IEDs in Iraq to Shi'ite Iran or Hezbollah. "There are certain pieces of information that lead us back either to Iranian elements or to Hezbollah," he said.
* In July 2006, Assem Hammoud a/k/a Amir Al-Andalousi, a Shi'ite Muslim from a prominent South Lebanese family of Hezbollah supporters, was arrested in Lebanon, after a stint in Canada as the ringleader of an Al-Qaeda (Sunni) plot to bomb several PATH train tunnels between New Jersey and Manhattan and murder thousands of commuters. Several of his cousins in the Hammoud family in Dearborn, Michigan, were convicted in cigarette smuggling and money-laundering for (Shi'ite) Hezbollah.
* That the Shi'ite Assem Hammoud trained with Al-Qaeda at Ein El-Hilweh, a Sunni Palestinian refugee camp (a U.S. taxpayer/UNRWA-funded entity) in Lebanon, is yet more refutation of the "Lions for Lambs" myth.
* A July 2007 report by Chagai Hoberman of Israeli newspaper HaZofe quotes Israeli Security Services sources as saying that Hezbollah (Shi'ite) now controls Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Sunni) in the West Bank. The sources said that they picked up Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorists in West Bank cities, like Shechem, over the past several years, who received weapons, money, and training from Hezbollah. In addition, they say Hezbollah controls the terrorist group, now.

Then, there is the other constant lie throughout "Lions for Lambs"--that American soldiers fighting in Iraq are mostly minorities, who have no choice but to join up and die.

Sure, viewers are shown white commanding officers who command and watch from a distance, and who are viciously attacked as "pieces of s**t" and "lambs" leading lions in a monologue by a college professor played by Robert Redford. But the film centers on two minority soldiers--a Black and a Hispanic--who were Professor Redford's students. We're told that minorities have no choice but to join the military. "They play football to go to college," Professor Redford admonishes one of his more privileged, slacker White students. They have no future or talent and are ridiculed by the White students on campus, so they must join up:

They weren't naturally gifted students. . . . The first ones to sign up are the ones whose country doesn't treat too well. The ones like you and me who went to good schools and were privileged like you and me, we're the first ones to step back when the country's looking for volunteers

lectures Professor Redford of Sundance University.

His White privileged slacker student responds that he doesn't have to care about this

because I wanna live the good life because I'm smart enough.

While "Lions for Lambs" wants to portray our fighting forces as strictly minorities and Whites as slacker frat boys who stay home, the two soldiers in the movie are commissioned men, who go upon graduation. And the fact is, the majority of those are White, not minorities. They all have college degrees, many of them graduate degrees. They are among America's best and brightest, who chose to go to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of starting their promising careers in the comfort of home.

One of those is Sgt. James John Regan, a star on the Duke Lacrosse Team, who had a scholarship to go to law school and an offer to work at a financial company. Instead, he joined the Army Rangers and served double tours of duty in both Afghanistan and Iraq, earning a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and several other medals. He was killed in action in Iraq, early this year. He was 26 and engaged to be married. His fiancee, Mary McHugh told Newsday that he felt it was imperative to join the Army and serve rather than taking one of the other safer, more lucrative offers:

He said, "If I don't do it, then who will do it?" He recognized it as an option and he couldn't not do it.

And there are so many other non-minority soldiers like him who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan, contrary to this movie's Redfordian claim.

But that doesn't fit with the myth that Robert Redford, Ph.D. and the rest of the "Lions for Lambs" gang is selling.

If there is any truth to this movie, it's the poignant heroism to the end displayed by the two soldiers portrayed in the film. But even that is not enough to justify the myths throughout this film.

At the end of the movie, Reporter Meryl Streep argues with her TV cable news network boss that Iraq is like Vietnam, and she doesn't believe our efforts to succeed will work so she doesn't want to report on them:

It's like that song by The Who. "Meet the new boss. It's the same as the old boss." It's the same as Vietnam all over again.

Streep's network boss orders her to report on it:

Sounds like he [Senator Tom Cruise] has a plan to destroy the guys who attacked our guys. . . . Our viewers will believe that's a good thing.

If only Hollywood believed it was a good thing.

And if only there was a single news exec for a major TV network news operation who ever uttered such a sentiment.



Redford's Vietnam in Afghanistan
By Lloyd Billingsley
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, November 15, 2007

What this movie is going to be about is evident from the start because they telegraph it with a flare gun. We fade in to the latest casualty report from Iraq. It's bad news, the report and the movie, really a filmed polemic that gives new meaning to the term "talkie." Here Hollywood liberals showcase their incoherence and fondle their favorite incantation.

In Lions for Lambs, the war on terror is nothing more than a replay of Vietnam. Ambitious, warmongering politicians are sending kids, especially blacks and latinos, to die in fields afar, victims of inept strategy and an overextended, racist, and imperialistic nation that has had its day. How to dramatize, that is the question.

The movie may be about the war on terror but viewers don't get to see terror in action, say a live beheading on a website, or even footage of 9/11. They only hear characters talking about terror, and that won't cut it in cinema. As Richard Grenier used to say, out of sight out of mind is the easiest way to stack the deck. The actual terrorists remain shadowy figures whose islamofascist ideology gets no definition. The dramatic effect is to render the enemy illusory, as though the war is about nothing.

No so for Senator Jasper Irving, played by Tom Cruise. He has a new plan for Afghanistan, forward movement of special forces, seizing the high ground. He brokers this plan to reporter Janine Roth, played by Meryl Streep. She is a baby boomer, now 57, who cut her reportorial teeth on Vietnam. She leaves few sixties clichés unturned, and at one point even quotes the Who, "same as the old boss." She is an encyclopedia of anti-Iraq-war boilerplate, not even very good as that.

Cut to Afghanistan, where the special forces are on the move. Their helicopter – another Vietnam symbol – takes fire en route to en route to a supposedly unoccupied mountain, the result of bad intelligence. Two soldiers, Arian Finch, who is black, and Ernie Rodriguez, generic latino, take hits and fall to the mountain. They thus Symbolize the Way the War on Terror Victimizes Minorities, another Vietnam canard. See Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam, for the real story.

Cut to "A University in California" – think Berkeley –where professor Stephen Malley, played by producer Robert Redford holds forth with student Todd Hayes. He is supposed to be one of the Best and Brightest but shows little evidence of smarts. Neither does the professor come off as particularly erudite, though he poses well and he sure can talk. He even explains the title, based on the view of German soldiers in World War I that the brave British grunts fought like lions for the cowardly "lambs," who commanded them. See the parallel? The conversation between professor and student makes little sense, but some realities emerge.

Arian and Ernie, it turns out, were two of Malley's students. They enjoyed much opportunity – athletic scholarships, for example – but then they volunteered to fight for America in Afghanistan. Professor Malley, who fought in Vietnam and was injured protesting the war after he came back, simply cannot understand what would prompt anyone to do such a thing for a racist nation that neglects the inner city and other sins.

Screenwriter Michael Matthew Carnahan has Arian and Ernie saying that, with military experience, they will be able to return home and do Many Good Things in line with a liberal agenda. If they come home, that is. Out on the mountain in Afghanistan they are both wounded and half buried in snow as the Taliban move in. Lt. Col. Falco calls in air strikes and mounts a rescue operation. Will it arrive in time to save them?

Cut back to Washington, where Janine Roth doesn't know what to do with this story. She is tired of swallowing the official propaganda that got us into this mess, and so on. Trouble with Iran is looming and Jasper Irving is hinting at nukes with his rhetoric of "whatever it takes."

Arian and Ernie are convinced the rescue mission will be late, which it is. They stand together in the face of the enemy. The Taliban gun them down while commanders watch the slaughter on the big screen. Music up with a swell. Message: join the Army and you are throwing your life away. Cut to Janine Roth, riding around Washington in a cab, tearfully observing Arlington cemetery and the White House. Todd Hayes still doesn't know what to do, despite the advice of Robert Redford, who wants him, and every member of the audience, to be a sixties' reenactor.

Utterly contrived and tedious to the point of punishment, Lions for Lambs is unlikely to satisfy even the most vocal critics of the war on terror. For those on the other side, this agit-prop even fails as self-satire. But it does serve as a reminder that, for the Hollywood liberal elite, America is always the villain and inherently bad – except, of course, for their mansion, Mercedes-Benz, and three-picture deal with Paramount. The film also confirms that there will always be a vast gap between that elite and those who volunteer to throw down with the Taliban.













Air + Head / Leftist Ideology = Robert Redford

[_the road to hana]

Impressive cut and paste skills. Redford making a flawed film has what to do with Mitt Romney, exactly?

[_Runtu]

Impressive cut and paste skills. Redford making a flawed film has what to do with Mitt Romney, exactly?

But it's the content that so impressive. Right-wingers don't like Redford's anti-war movie. Who could have known?

[_Coggins7]

Impressive cut and paste skills. Redford making a flawed film has what to do with Mitt Romney, exactly?

Redford has serious problems with attachment to reality, that's what it has to do with Mitt Romney. Redford is a Leftist, a socialist, and a member of a bohemian artist's colony called Hollywood who's values and beliefs are at the very outer finges of intellectual and moral respectability.

Conclusion: Redford is not to be taken seriously, whether the subject is his pretentious cinematic sermonizing or his views of Mitt Romney.