“Right and Wrong.” It’s a silly dated idea, I know. As a progressive society after all, shouldn’t we be past the antiquated idea of moral absolutes? We’re big thinkers, and a higher-learned people. Let’s leave the obtuse “black and white” mindset to those simplistic conservatives. They’re so silly. Plus, they don’t like having sex.

It seems that over the past several decades, we haven’t been able to avoid having the “moral relativism” mantra pumped into our brains. Sometimes it’s subconscious (being planted in our minds from under-the-radar messages in the talkies of Tinseltown) and sometimes it’s less subtle than Johnny Depp’s awful pubic-hair goatee. How does this resonate with the American people, however? Do most of us believe that a majority of the worlds issues are really just shades of grey? (more…)

Try to get your mind around this: In Joy Behar’s partisan-crazed world, hypocrisy is a sin worse than serial adultery. 

In other words, had Tiger Woods lectured schoolchildren on the importance of preserving the institution of marriage, marital fidelity and not being promiscuous — you know, the kind of healthy behavior that’s key to a happy life — she’d be giving him all kinds of hell right now. But, since he only cheated on his wife…

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Does that kind of thinking make any sense to you?

It does if you see the design behind it. The left wants to shut the right up, especially those trying to uphold traditional moral standards. And in order to silence those who would stand up for such things, with the help of popular culture and the media, they’ve managed to turn the world upside down into a place where you’re better off not trying to do good than risking the stigma of hypocrisy. (more…)

When I first started contributing to Big Hollywood, one of the rules I set for myself was to never discuss non-political figures, specifically folks in Hollywood.  There is plenty to write about without insulting members of the industry you are trying to work in.  So, in writing today about Roman Polanski, my purpose is not to malign the child-raping son-of-a-bitch himself, but to discuss the broader cultural ramifications of Hollywood’s support for his vile, child-raping son-of-a-bitchery.

The Founders of this nation understood full-well that a nation of liberty could not long survive without a strong moral foundation.  If government exists to control people, then limited government naturally would control them very little.  The potential upside was tremendous.  If allowed to live free, a human being might pursue their own interests to the betterment of all of society.  Freedom means a man might strive, risk, and fail, but it also meant that he might strive, risk, and succeed.  As this process played out over time, it might well become the single greatest engine for innovation and wealth creation in all of human history.  (more…)

There is no doubt the State of Ohio, like many others, is in a financial mess. If you looked at the history of our economy you would notice that there have always been ups and downs. Individuals seem to understand this and plan for times of lean and times of plenty. Governments and our elected officials seem to have missed that day in Economics 101. Governments always seem to be shocked when the economy goes south for a while.

Our Governor Tom Strickland has a plan to balance the Ohio budget. Here it is in a nutshell: “Let’s gamble our way to prosperity!” As a comic my natural instinct is to ridicule this idea and to highlight the fact the Governor is ignoring that four times in the last twenty years the voters, by a wide margin, have refused casino gambling. (more…)

The vast majority of adults in this world know that moral perfection is absolutely impossible, so I get upset when self proclaimed Hollywood/MSM liberals ruthlessly attack any conservative that cannot do the impossible; avoid succumbing to temptation for their entire life. Hollywood/MSM liberals always use this angle to attack conservatives nationwide because by strongly believing in nothing specific they’ve set themselves up to perpetually come out on top of any moral argument, guilt, worry and public-scorn free.

In today’s Hollywood a famous liberal filmmaker could hire a hooker while shooting a $100,000,000 studio feature film, secretly charge it to the budget, snort coke in his trailer between shots and drop E at night without any real concern for condemnation or job loss if he’s caught, because, well, he never proclaimed to be on the side of good in the first place. Whereas a famous conservative Christian filmmaker (pretend with me here) caught doing the same thing would be ridiculed and kicked out of town for the hypocrisy of it all since, by being Christian, he openly admitted that kind of behavior is not the most desirable for himself and doesn’t set a very good example for the fans. (more…)

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)