by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n What’s Hollywood to Do?<\/strong><\/p>\n Over the last eight years we saw\u00a0Fahrenheit 911<\/em>,\u00a0Syriana<\/em>,\u00a0Redacted<\/em>,Rendition<\/em>,\u00a0Stop Loss<\/em>,\u00a0Lions for Lambs<\/em>,\u00a0In the Valley of Elah<\/em>, and a host of other movies released about the U.S. war on terror and the Iraqi conflict. The general theme was that George Bush lied and so destroyed the Constitution and put us into Iraq, where we are waging an amoral war, among other unmentionables.<\/p>\n Are there additional such movies in the pipeline? After all, U.S. policy under President Obama has largely adhered to the Petraeus\/Bush plan in Iraq; Obama actually accelerated operations in Afghanistan where losses are spiking. Renditions and tribunals continue. So do Predator strikes, as well as wiretaps and intercepts. Guantanamo, while not in the daily news as before, remains open. Have suddenly, say, between November 2008 and today, the above policies changed in any measurable manner, or, was the furor simply that the policies\u00a0per se<\/em>\u00a0were never the problem, just the person who implemented and oversaw them? Take him away, and presto, the same policies become fine \u2014 and thus no longer warrant the best and brightest in Hollywood to offer much needed expos\u00e9s?<\/p>\n All of which poses the question: What is Hollywood to do now? Do a hit piece on Panetta’s CIA? Obama and the new opium war in Afghanistan? Robert Gates’s unlawful Pentagon? The back-room deals of Hillary Clinton at State? In nine months, we went from lions to lambs?<\/p>\n First Stones<\/strong><\/p>\n There was a quite tough “I accuse” column by Maureen Dowd on the hypocrisy of Republicans who talk of morals and then prove to be captives of their all-too-real appetites. Fair enough. Some of her examples do juxtapose sermonizing with womanizing, and score points. But . . . wait: Who will police the police?<\/p>\n This moralist, I think, is the same journalistic scold who only recently in another hit piece clearly plagiarized a paragraph from another writer and then when caught (remember, the cover-up is always worse than the crime) in weird Mark Sanford-like rambling fashion pleaded that she had only inadvertently stolen it from an unidentified correspondent, who in turn had first lifted it from someone else (e.g., “I was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent \u2014 and I assumed spontaneous \u2014 way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column”). Sort of like the purchaser of a fenced TV pleading that she’s innocent since she didn’t steal the set herself. If the hypocritical sin of the pious politician is adultery, then surely its moral counterpart for the journalist is intellectual theft followed by a refusal to ‘fess up when caught.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner What’s Hollywood to Do? Over the last eight years we saw\u00a0Fahrenheit 911,\u00a0Syriana,\u00a0Redacted,Rendition,\u00a0Stop Loss,\u00a0Lions for Lambs,\u00a0In the Valley of Elah, and a host of other movies released about the U.S. war on terror and the Iraqi conflict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[653],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Fw","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1695,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/so-what-happened-to-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":2574,"position":0},"title":"So What Happened to Iraq?","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 19, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Six years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Ayad Allawi, then prime minister of the appointed Iraqi Interim Government, was a puppet of the United States. Last month, though, the Allawi-led Iraqiya alliance won, by a narrow margin, more parliamentary seats than any\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2010"","block_context":{"text":"April 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/april-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7942,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-biggest-lie\/","url_meta":{"origin":2574,"position":1},"title":"The Biggest Lie","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The Left would rather forget its old slogan, \u201cBush lied, thousands died.\u201d by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The very mention of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)\u00a0and Iraq was toxic for Republicans by 2005. They wanted to forget about the supposed absence of recently manufactured WMD in great\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"President George W. Bush at the White House, February 2005 (Alex Wong\/Getty Images)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/pic_giant_102114_SM_George-W-Bush-G-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7896,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iraq-was-then-syria-is-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":2574,"position":2},"title":"Iraq Was Then, Syria Is Now","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 30, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama hasn\u2019t a clue what he\u2019s doing, but at least he isn\u2019t George W. Bush. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The Iraq War lies now mostly in the realm of myth. We have forgotten exactly how we got both into and out of the war. The October\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"U.S. Marines in Baghdad, April 2003 (Oleg Nikishin\/Getty Images)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/pic_giant_093014_SM_Iraqi-Freedom-G-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1283,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iraq-through-the-looking-glass\/","url_meta":{"origin":2574,"position":3},"title":"Iraq Through the Looking Glass","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Most Americans will support President Obama\u2019s call for patience in Afghanistan and his policy of continuing the long-planned drawdown in Iraq. But there was something bizarre about his entire Iraq speech \u2014 it was as if it were being delivered by an exhausted Obama\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "September 2010"","block_context":{"text":"September 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/september-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1828,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bidenism\/","url_meta":{"origin":2574,"position":4},"title":"Bidenism","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 19, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media \u201cI am very optimistic about \u2014 about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Joe Biden, February 12, 2010. Just Politics? All politicians hedge and backtrack, as the daily news proves their previous assertions and boasts wrong.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2010"","block_context":{"text":"February 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/february-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6411,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-indicts-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":2574,"position":5},"title":"Obama Indicts Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 3, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media One of the problems that Barack Obama has in mounting an attack against the Assad regime is that the gambit violates every argument Barack Obama used against the Bush administration to establish his own anti-war candidacy. The hypocrisy is so stunning that it infuriates\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/commentary-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2575,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574\/revisions\/2575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}