"GOD, YOU'VE MADE A POWERFUL ENEMY." Hugh Hewitt issues a warning to Tom Hanks:

Tom: Careful now. The Saturday Night Live skit was great fun, and the ""It's only a movie," works. The pull quotes from this story do not:

Hanks said objectors to The Da Vinci Code are taking the film too seriously, telling the Evening Standard: "We always knew there would be a segment of society that would not want this movie to be shown....

...It is difficult to use the "it is only a movie" argument when mixed up with "dialogue is good" and "creepy censors want to shut us down" arguments.

The almost universally liked Hanks doesn't need to get into the theological debate that Dan browns likes to fan. Stick to the obvious --it is an absurd piece of invention that makes for a fun thriller-- and all will be well...

...and if ya don't, me and my blogger buddies will write a densely-worded essay about how theatre seats chafe our fat asses.

Many nuggets of comedy gold here. First, the overblown concern over a fucking Ron Howard (syn: stupid) movie; then, the notion that Hewitt can shake the very caliphs of Hollyweird with the force of his blog, a delusion known in the business as Sidney Applebaum Syndrome.

There is also a weird poignance about conservatives who are mesermized by Hollywood. As it is the place they hate most in the world -- more even than Paris, or the human heart -- one would think they would just avoid the subject altogether, as it is obviously irredeemable (at least until Der Tag, when Roger L. Simon is named Minister of Truth) and naught but blight on the land.

Some of them can't keep their hands off, though. Witness John Podhoretz's strange column on "American Idol." I kept waiting for the metaphor, or at least the punch line, to emerge. Finally in horror I realized that John son of Podhoretz, Decrier of Kultur Filth fils, was talking about "American Idol" because he rilly liked "American Idol"; also, that the column wasn't as bad as much of the current, politicized rightwing bunk about TV and movies, because "American Idol" is such a piece of shit that it doesn't qualify as culture, and deserves to be discussed in the debased terms of politics.

It suggests a possible solution to all the conservative culture crap currently stinking up our discourse: let the Medveds and Mathewes-Greens and all other such professional misapprehenders exclusively use sub-cultural objects such as "The Apprentice" and "Herbie: Fully Loaded" as teething rings. As they are capable of seeing, or perhaps fated to see, political portents on every moving object, the specific objects to which their attentions are directed should not matter to them or us.

As the old saying goes, politics is show business for ugly people, and my new corollary is: blogging is politics and show business for the mentally retarded.