Someone hand them a tissue

Steven Spielberg and George Clooney on how hard it is being super-brave billionaire liberal parrots speaking truth to power in a society of neoconservative oppression:

SPIELBERG: I think we all have been given our marching orders ... Maybe I shouldn't get into this. [Pause] I just feel that filmmakers are much more proactive since the second Bush administration. I think that everybody is trying to declare their independence and state their case for the things that we believe in. No one is really representing us, so we're now representing our own feelings, and we're trying to strike back.

So Bush has been good for film?

SPIELBERG: I wouldn't just say Bush. The whole neo-conservative movement.

CLOONEY: Because it's polarizing. I'm not going to sit up and say, "This is how you should think." But let's at least acknowledge that there should be an open debate, and not be told that it's unpatriotic to ask questions.

I will give $100 dollars to anyone who can produce a verifiable instance where either Spielberg or Clooney were told by an authority figure that they couldn't make their wildly inaccurate, anti-historical pieces of celluloid garbage, because the pretentious little shits were just too much of a "danger to the system".

The interview wasn't a total waste. Here's the director of gay groupthink movie Brokeback Mountain, admitting that the liberal agenda is now the Hollywood mainstream:

CLOONEY: From the end of the first wave of the civil-rights movement, all the way through Watergate, people were constantly talking about what was going on in the country. Now it seems that's happening again. You can sit in a room and have people talk about politics—in Los Angeles, of all places.

LEE: There seems to be a collective social consciousness.

Clooney really means that it's okay to sit around and bash Bush in Los Angeles. Can you imagine the flow of the conversation if you sat some really articulate and intelligent conservative down with these mentally-stunted peacocks? Clooney would hang around about as long as I sat through Oceans 12.

Finally, there is another wonderful (yet completely unintentional) admission from Spielberg - Mr "I would die for Israel" - that his film Munich is intentionally biased against the conservative perspective, and that he never expected his fellow progressives to be offended by it:

Did you expect the political reaction to "Munich" to be this heated?

SPIELBERG: I knew we were going to receive a volley from the right. I was surprised that we received a much smaller, but no less painful, volley from the left. It made me feel a little more aware of the dogma, and the Luddite position people take any time the Middle East is up for discussion.

So many fundamentalists in my own community, the Jewish community, have grown very angry at me for allowing the Palestinians simply to have dialogue and for allowing Tony Kushner to be the author of that dialogue. "Munich" never once attacks Israel, and barely criticizes Israel's policy of counterviolence against violence. It simply asks a plethora of questions. It's the most questioning story I've ever had the honor to tell. For that, we were accused of the sin of moral equivocation. Which, of course, we didn't intend—and we're not guilty of.

That was, of course, complete bullshit. Had he really set out to make a non-partisan film which didn't take sides, he should have expected to cop flak from both political extremes. That he expected it solely from the right says one thing - this was a film whose central goal was to indict Israel for defending itself.

Israelis are upset that Tony Kushner is the one Spielberg chose to be the author of the Palestinian "dialogue"? I wonder why? Could it be his publicly-stated position on Israel?

“I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity…. I wish modern Israel hadn’t been born.”

Or could it be that his portrayal of those Palestinians is a hagiography? His terrorists are sweet, loving fathers of adorable little children whom the evil Israeli agents forever tear them away from. We catch no glimpse of the many Israeli children who lost their fathers in Munich, or those in Israel itself. Fathers who were ordinary civilians who played no part in any "oppression" of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinians who Kushner portrays are men who are unlike the Israeli operatives in one important way - and this is how Kushner reveals his otherwise hidden admiration for the terrorists. While the Israeli operatives sink deeper into fits of depression and self-loathing the more terrorists they kill, the Palestinian terrorists themselves, men who have slaughtered (or caused to be slaughtered) dozens of Israeli civilians (as opposed to the Israelis who strictly only kill terrorists) have no trouble sleeping at night. They aren't shown suffering any fits of self-doubt. These are men who would have killed Jewish children in their lifetimes, and they don't bat an introspective eyelid.

Why does Kushner do this? Simple. He believes that the Palestinian cause is just, and the Israeli one unjust. That is why he can show terrorists who suffer none of the guilt that so vividly tears at the soul of the Israelis.

In Kushner's twisted mind, the innocent Israelis who the Palestinians kill have it coming. The terrorists themselves do not. Why else would he show the Israeli assassins actually weeping over their part in the elimination of terrorists who - if allowed to live - would merely go on killing dozens of Israeli citizens?

No, we are forced to draw this conclusion, because the only other one left open to us - that the Israeli men are emotional weaklings; lesser men than the terrorists they face is (hopefully) below even a cheap propagandist like Kushner.

Dialogue? I think not. Spielberg and Kushner both deserve to be beaten to bloody pulps for this gross insult to some very brave men who dared to do what self-loathing, weakling Jews like they will never do - actually do something which might involve their dying for Israel, and not merely talking about it in empty platitudes, from the safety of a sound stage in California.