Rich: Top Gun vs. Total Recall (Nails Repugs)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/arts/14RICH.html

Only in America could a guy who struts in an action-hero's Hollywood costume and barks macho lines from a script pass for a plausible political leader. But if George W. Bush can get away with it, why should Arnold Schwarzenegger be pilloried for the same antics?

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It is hilarious to watch conservatives — the same conservatives who often decry phony Hollywood liberals and their followers — betray their own inviolate principles to bask in Arnold's hulking movie-star aura so that they might possibly gain a nominal Republican victory in the bargain. Even the 1977 Oui magazine interview in which Mr. Schwarzenegger bragged about participating in orgies — not to mention his repeated admissions of drug use — can't frighten them away.

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Ann Coulter has a term for conservatives who wimp out like this — "girly boys." But she's gone all girly herself over Arnold, telling Larry King that "I'm impressed enough that he's in Hollywood, he's married to a Kennedy and he still calls himself a Republican — that's good enough for me." Perhaps. Her friend, Bill Maher, has taken a somewhat darker view of these unlikely political conversions. "If his father wasn't a Nazi," he has said of Arnold, "he wouldn't have any credibility with conservatives at all."

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New polls reveal that Americans increasingly realize that they have been had. Reruns are not kind to this White House's scripted costume drama of May 1; the seams show. More and more viewers recognize that the banner reading "Mission Accomplished" in the "Top Gun" spectacle was idle set decoration, especially given that the number of American casualties in that mission has more than doubled since then. They know, too, that the president's uniform was from stock, and perhaps by now have heard how his speech was deliberately delayed almost three hours after his tailhook landing so that it would fall into that magical twilight hour that cinematographers find most romantic. Some may even realize that the president's breezy dialogue upon deplaning — "I miss flying, I can tell you that" — was too ironic by half, given that he had actually missed some of his required flights during his stay-at-home stint for the Texas Air National Guard while others fought the Vietnam War.

[disgruntella]

1. thanks

That article has a lot of good laughs (love the Maher quote!). Nice way to end my evening...

[Unknown Known]

2. Could Rich BE anymore right!!

Rich and Krugman are my two favorite columnists. Everything they write rings of plain, old common sense.