This is the time of year when most people are busy resolving to do better in the future. Some people vow to go on diets or exercise more, some promise to give up smoking or booze. But, year in and year out, I vow to cut liberals more slack and give them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, just as with other people’s good intentions, my own rarely last until nightfall. The difference is that the reason mine die on the vine, as it were, has nothing to do with my own lack of character, but everything to do with the failings of liberals.

For one thing, liberals are hypocritical. They have agendas when they’d be better off having principles. They praise whistle-blowers and investigative reporters, but only when Republicans, conservatives and/or the U.S. military suffer the consequences. So it was that they lionized Daniel Ellsberg for turning the Pentagon Papers over to the NY Times and heralded Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for their Watergate expose, but demanded that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles be prosecuted for their ACORN videos and wanted the computer hackers who uncovered the East Anglia emails, the ones proving global warming to be a major hoax, to be tarred and feathered. (more…)

Recently, I was called cranky in an article posted at the Huffington Post.  The good news is that it’s one of the few times that anything approaching the truth has been posted there.  The part I resented, though, was having my crankiness attributed to age.  The fact is I was a precocious curmudgeon.  But the question that springs to mind is why more people aren’t cranky these days when there is so much to be cranky about.

For instance, it used to irk me that Carl Bernstein, a rather minor footnote in America’s history, who only came to prominence because an anonymous snitch chose to pass along secrets to him and Bob Woodward, was depicted in two major motion pictures, “All the President’s Men” (Dustin Hoffman) and “Heartburn” (Jack Nicholson), when so many more deserving people haven’t been featured in any.  But that pales when compared to the number of movies that have glorified Che Guevara, a blood-thirsty villain.  In addition to numerous TV productions, he has shown up in “Che!” (Omar Sharif), “Evita” (Antonio Banderas), “Motorcycle Diaries” (Eduardo Noriega Gael Garcia Bernal) and “Che: Parts One and Two” (Benecio Del Toro). (more…)

My earlier essay on intentional inaccuracies in the Frost/Nixon movie bemoaned the fact that this sort of quasi-documentary has such dramatic impact-because people actually “see” the invented wrongdoing-that it outweighs any writings constrained by actual fact. 

Perhaps the best example of this comes from the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” produced by Robert Redford and starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as cub Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  

The movie was a dramatization of Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book by the same name that chronicled the investigative reporting that led to the resignations of Bob Haldeman and John Erhlichman.  The book was a best-seller in its own right-especially after their editor suggested the early drafts needed something more catchy and they hit upon the idea of naming Woodward’s secret source of government information after the recent pornographic movie, “Deep Throat.”  (more…)