Just came back from watching Zero Dark Thirty. Good stuff, and I can see why the Left hates
it.
Here's what bunches up Lefties' panties:
1. The movie shows
the CIA successfully torturing people to get the information we need to find
bin Laden. Lots of things about this
irritate the Left. First, they cannot
abide the idea any information we got through aggressive questioning was
actually useful. Second, they certainly
don't want enhanced interrogation presented in such a way as to look like it
could possibly be justified. Zero Dark
Thirty manages to do both. Third, and
this may be the most artistically unforgivable thing the movie did, the movie
showed prisoner treatment far worse than anything the CIA actually did do* and
we in the theater couldn't care less. As
far as I could tell from the audience around me, if the CIA guy wanted to shove
the jihadi into a four foot by two foot box for a couple days, that was just
fine by us. This must particularly
enrage your average anti-American Lefty in Hollywood. It's one thing to make a movie that makes
child molesters seem like regular guys; that's just expanding the horizons of
us poor, benighted Red Staters. But show
the US Government righteously jumping
ugly in the defense of America, well, that must never be done.
2. When a Navy SEAL
goes to work he doesn't fool around.
Your average frogman commando clearing a room does not leave live bad
guys behind him. No Miranda rights read
to anybody. Once you do something to
cause a SEAL to "engage" you, you are engaged good and proper and
permanent. Sorry, Haji, no hard
feelings. Once again, the audience
around me seemed to agree this was a no-brainer.
3. Obama is a fool, a
liar, or both. The only reference to the
Big O was a video clip of him in the background claiming the U.S. doesn't
torture anybody. The video was playing
in the mess hall where two of the "torturers" were discussing
business. The only other reference to
the administration at all was when the slick, well-dressed suits from the White
House were making it clear to the CIA guys they were mostly interested in
making sure an attack on bin Laden didn't reflect poorly on the President.
4. I haven't seen
this mentioned anywhere else yet but it may be an even bigger point than the
others: the movie continually referenced
how the CIA messed up its assessment of Iraqi WMDs. Not George Bush, not Neo-cons, not the
Zionist lobby. Sometimes the CIA just
guesses wrong and it was the CIA that guessed wrong on Iraq. The Left's urban myth about how George W.
Bush "lied" us into a war in Iraq is a matter of faith among their
true believers. For this film to flatly declare
that the Iraqi WMD mistake was just another intelligence screw-up, and not some
evil plot concocted by the BusHitler, must be particularly galling.
5. Just as a general
matter, there isn't the slightest hint in Zero Dark Thirty of the US being the
bad guy, nor does it raise any questions about who the true bad guys might be. The people we are fighting are mass
murderers. Our "allies" among
them sometimes have to be bribed just to help us out. They burned three thousand Americans alive in
the middle of New York City and the entire fight since then has been our
response to that atrocity, and our attempts - often unsuccessful - to stop them
from committing more atrocities.
The more I think about it, the worse this movie seems from a
Lefty's point of view. No wonder they
can't stand it.
* For a retired CIA guy's take on the Zero Dark Thirty torture scenes, you may want to read this.







