Krauthammer: " Oscars for Osama"

Charles Krauthammer in today's Washington Post:

Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign-language film is "Paradise Now," a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is "Munich," a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday's fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.

But until you see "Syriana," nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.

The "Syriana" script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: "The Deputy National Security Advisor, MARILYN RICHARDS, 40's, sculpted hair, with the soul of a seventy year-old white, Republican male, is in charge" (Page 21).
...

The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women's rights and democracy.

What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less -- at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish "oilman of the year" celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.

What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today concerns America's excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote -- against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism -- local leaders like the Good Prince.

Who in the greater Middle East is closest to the modernizing, democratizing paragon of "Syriana"?

Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of exemplary -- and quite nonfictional -- personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament.

Hundreds of brave American (and allied NATO) soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established to allow him to govern.

On the very night the Oscars will be honoring "Syriana," American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim leader that "Syriana" shows America slaughtering.

It gets worse.

Well, trust Hollywood, if you know what I mean. From "The Sands of Iwo Jima" to "Syriana" in two generations.

Krauthammer ends with:

Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. "Syriana" is of a different species entirely -- a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.

Those last two sentences really get at what much of Hollywood and America's Left is about: anti-Americanism and helping the other side.

The anti-Americanism is deliberate.

But I doubt many in the anti-American crowd realize they're helping America's enemies. They usually hold in their head some scenario in which "the people" wake up to their oppression and bring dramatic change to our imperialist government - think Dennis Kucinich as President, Sean Penn as U. N. Ambassador, Ramsey Clark once again Attorney General. Those folks embrace Castro and Chavez. And suddenly peace and justice break out.

I don't plan to watch the Oscars. But I do plan to keep reading Charles Krauthammer and listening to him most week nights on Fox's Special Edition with Brit Hume. Krauthammer's one of the best. So, for that matter, is Brit Hume.