The Day After Tomorrow (not to be confused with Next Friday, starring Ice Cube) - message: LIBERALS ARE
RIGHT ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING! The hyper-silly disaster epic is based on a book coauthored by UFO/ black-
helicopter/the-CIA-is-beaming-microwaves-into-my-teeth-fillings guru and late-night AM radio maven Art Bell.
The Cider House Rules - message: LIBERALS ARE RIGHT ABOUT ABORTION! Kindly small-town abortionist
(Michael Caine) just wants to help unwed pregnant girls. Disaster strikes when it turns out the young lad taking over
Caine s practice (Tobey Maguire) is opposed to abortion because it's "wrong." The lad soon learns the error of his
ways after a black teenaged girl from a family of apple pickers is raped and impregnated by her own father and
needs an abortion. (You can't remind people too often that most women having abortions were raped by their own
fathers.) This film was a veritable ode to moral relativism and the hideous notion that there are no rules save the
ones we make up ourselves as we go along. Shockingly, it only won a single Oscar.
The American President - message: DEMOCRATS WILL VOTE THEIR CONSCIENCES EVEN IF IT HURTS
THEM POLITICALLY AND ALL REPUBLICANS EVER DO is CALL PEOPLE NAMES. In this movie, Michael
Douglas plays Bill Clinton as Clinton would like to be - handsome, thin, courageous, liberal, and widowed. The
president's top Republican adversary goes on national TV and calls the president's girlfriend a "whore." So it's a
plausible story.
Dave - message: LIBERALS ARE RIGHT ABOUT FEDERAL SPENDING ON THE HOMELESS! Only the president
can put an end to homelessness, and he's got to cut 1500 million in pork from the discretionary budget to do so. He
finds the money by poring over the entire federal budget (during an "all-nighter") with the help of his tax guy, played
by Charles Grodin. (Of course, to do that, the president would need a line-item veto. Now which party, do you
suppose, supports a line-item veto and which opposes it?)
Of the dozens and dozens of nonfiction books to come out about the Clinton presidency, only one was made into a
movie: The Hunting of the President, by fanatical Clinton apologists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. (Message:
LIBERALS WERE RIGHT ABOUT CLINTON, EVEN IF THERE ARE ONLY TWO LIBERALS LEFT DEFENDING
HIM!) The intriguing plotline is this: A lot of mean people tried to bring down a great president.
Leaving aside which account most closely resembles the truth, which one of these sounds like a better movie plot:
Movie Plot A: Through the freak accident of a third-party candidacy, a lying, horndog Jimmy Swaggart type
somehow ends up as president of the United States. As his Eva Peron-style wife tries to socialize all industry, the
president gallivants with Hollywood starlets, has repeated affairs, accepts illegal campaign donations from foreign
enemies, and uses the vast powers of the federal government to frighten and intimidate the people who get in his
way. Some end up dead, some have their secret FBI files pored over by a former bar bouncer, some are audited by
the IRS. He is finally brought down when he ejaculates on an intern's dress and lies about it under oath - and it
turns out the intern has kept the dress!
Movie Plot B: For no reason whatsoever, a few oddball private citizens develop a deep personal antipathy for a
"Third Way," moderate Democratic president.
Amazingly, Hollywood actually made a movie, Bob Roberts, in which the slick, cosmetic tricks of the sophisticated
right-wing political machine hoodwink the American people. (So that's why liberals are losing all the arguments in
real life!)
Since cable news has begun forcing liberals to confront opposing points of view in real life rather than movie scripts
where the Republicans' only argument is to call the president's girlfriend a "whore," liberals have been trying to drop
emotionalism as their main argument. Their new posture is mock hardheaded realism. Now they begin sentences
with phrases like, "The fact of the matter is," or "Experts say" - followed by comically false assertions. Liberals flex
their spindly little muscles and announce that everything that used to make them cry - gun ownership, racial
profiling, missile defense, school vouchers, torturing terror suspects - simply "doesn't work." The fact is, it doesn't
work, this is according to several studies, and no, you can't see them, why would you ask?
After nineteen nearly identical-looking Muslim men hijacked four airplanes and murdered 3,000 Americans, people
weren't in much of a mood for liberal preachiness about racial profiling. So instead of crying and trying to make
Americans feel guilty, liberals pretended to be hardheaded realists. Asked if there was anything wrong with ethnic
profiling at airports after 9/11, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said, "Yes, it doesn't work." Other, better
ideas, he said, were face-recognition technology and national ID cards. These would work great - if only we knew
who the terrorists were. But if we knew who the terrorists were, the only plane they'd be boarding would be headed
to Guantanamo and we wouldn't need to search anyone at all.
On CNN, Juliette Kayyem, from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, assured viewers that "no
one is disagreeing" with extra scrutiny for potential terrorists. But profiling, she said, "won't work." It wouldn't work,
allegedly, because al Qaeda "exists in places from Algeria to Zimbabwe." True, but since we're in America, wouldn't
it be a big help if we could screen out most of the Americans? Liberals think "it doesn't work" has such a nice ring to
it that the patent absurdity of what they're saying should not detract from their argument.
After Senator Teddy Kennedy tried to block federal funding for the government's program to fingerprint and
photograph people entering the country from twenty-five Muslim nations, his sleazy back-door maneuver was
defended on Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor by Sarah Eltantawi of the objective, nonpartisan, well-groomed
Muslim Public Affairs Council. Eltantawi said it was a "huge mischaracterization" to think she was going to complain