Liars For Libel; Hollywood Still Badly Misses the Target

A new film is opening up this month, a little “make you think” piece directed by Robert Redford, whose ego demands that he also show up in the film as an actor. "Lions for Lambs" is essentially three stories, ostensibly representing three different views of the war, not in Iraq but in Afghanistan. The first story examines the overview of the war, and contends that no one knows how to fight terrorism, which is a bald lie, but a convenient one for Redford, since it attempts to establish a moral equivalency between Left and Right; if no one has the right answer, no one can claim the other side is wrong, hmm?

The film is a clear bit of Democrat propaganda; a heroic and idealistic Liberal reporter (played by Streep) taking on the claims of a fairly bombastic Republican Senator (Cruise), and while on the face it appears that the debate is balanced, I found it biased, which is hardly surprising given the director, the screenplay, and the casting.

The second story is even more hard-Left, casting Redford as an idealistic university professor who worries that students simply do not care about the world in general, and it is somehow up to him to convince them, as the film’s tagline goes, “If you don’t stand for something, you might fall for anything”, which in the context of the film never explores the possibility that the Left might be the side harboring the con men, but this is to be expected from Redford.

The third story pretends to be the ‘conservative’ side, focusing on two soldiers trying to stay alive while surrounded by Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Like so many offerings from Hollywood, the story presented is completely alien to actual events and true military doctrine used by U.S. forces, but then it would be stunning indeed for Hollywood to actually pay attention to what real troops really do, to examine the true tactics or listen to real accounts of battle in the present war. The truth, as always, is inconvenient for the Left, and so Redford uses nothing of the sort in his work.

This character of film-making is nothing surprising. Before this film, Redford’s work included a disillusioned spy trainer in “Spy Game”, a hacker working against both the NSA and the Mafia in “Sneakers”, a soldier betrayed by a blundering government in “A Bridge Too Far”, an idealistic reporter in “All The President’s Men”, and an innocent man being hunted down by the CIA in “Three Days of the Condor”.

As for Meryl Streep, her history includes “Rendition”, an already-infamous account of how Iran is good and Israel and the United States are bad bad bad, “The Machurian Candidate” (the 2004 remake) where conservatives brain-wash candidates and kill anyone trying to stop them, and of course “The Deer Hunter”, where Vietnam Vets suffer horribly from trauma caused, you guessed it, by a callous U.S. government.

As for Tom Cruise, it’s true he did “Top Gun” as a hot-shot Navy pilot, but he also did the “Mission Impossible” movies, where the U.S. government is always up to no good, “A Few Good Men”, where he plays an idealistic Liberal attorney determined to prove that Marines abuse their recruits, and of course his early work in “Taps”, playing a beserk Cadet Captain who kills dozens of people in a spree of blood lust. It is hardly coincidence that Redford loaded his film up with anti-American propagandists. It is fortunate in that respect, however, because the American public, contrary to Redford’s “disappointment” in their standards, has a fairly good memory, and most of us are not willing to pay money to sit and see our nation and its leaders smeared with lies and insults. We can see that for free every night on network television, after all.