I used to joke about it; someday, even the hard left won’t be able to deny that Ronald Reagan changed history by setting in motion the events that brought down the USSR.
And when Hollywood and The Media realized this, they’d set in motion the machinery to claim credit for it themselves.
And thus we have Charlie Wilson’s War:
This is progress. With “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a trio of liberal Hollywood A-listers — director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and actor-producer Tom Hanks — have made a movie that acknowledges the evil of Soviet communism, celebrates Cold War hawkishness and more or less decries the post-Vietnam evisceration of U.S. intelligence services.
Hey, by 2027, we may even get a film about American war heroes in Iraq.
I do want to see the movie; left-symp filtering aside, it’s one of the great – and heretofore uncovered – subjects of my lifetime; the collapse of the USSR, decried as impossible by the left even as late as 1991, a fait accompli by the time Bill Clinton took office.
It’s possible, too, that the filmmakers have fashioned a new genre of Washington-based drama, one that combines detail-laden high seriousness about geopolitics with the screwball sensibility and smart dialogue of Preston Sturges.
Perhaps. There’s no denying that Aaron Sorkin is as talented a writer as he is a smug Hollywood liberal. It’s a maddening conflict for a conservative who loves good art and a good story.
I’ll have to try to see it over the weekend, and give my review after the holidays…
That little dope addict Sorkin manages to pikn 9/11 on the Reagan administration. I guess Slick Willy’s off the hook now.
At least it sounds like the film gives some context to the claim that ‘we created Osama!’.
Standard left revisionism on the end of the cold war is that the Soviet menace was clearly overblown by people like Reagan and that if we’d engaged the Russki’s instead of being confrontational the Cold War would have ended sooner.
And then you have the loonies like Chomsky & Parenti who regret the collapse of Soviet communism.
Standard left revisionism on the end of the cold war …
…is both the “Threat was overblown” meme, and the “We knew it all along” meme.
Dinesh D’Souza, in his bio of Reagan, goes through a fascinating litany of lefty (and some righty) commentators declaring during the eighties, and even in the early nineties, that the USSR was here to stay that we’d better just get used to it; in some cases, he juxtaposes the pre-1991 stances with the post-fall declarations. Particularly hilarious – “Soviet Expert” Strobe Talbott, who spent the nineties undercutting the Reagan legacy, but in 1991, almost as the Wall was falling and as Yeltsin was kicking coup-monger ass in Moscow, declared “the USSR is here to stay, get over it” (I’m paraphrasing, naturally).
Thanks for the tip. I just saw it at Highland Theatre
http://www.fandango.com/st.paulmannhighlandtheatre_aafor/theaterpage
There were maybe 10 people at the 12:30 matinee. I liked it. Obviously Wilson wasn’t the model representative …