SHORTER NATIONAL REVIEW DORKS: Evil liberals seek to rob us of our war-rage -- Thank Jesus for that great American patriot, Oliver Stone!

UPDATE. To understand what's so deeply funny about this -- I mean besides their sudden, raging hard-on for a man they previously considered one of the "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America" -- I will call out a short yip from K-Lo's ravings:

As it happens, the most refreshing thing about Stone’s new film is that it is anything but political. You want your politicians political, not your movie producers. But it’s impossible not to take a political message from the movie, all the same — whatever the chatterers may or may not say about it in the coming weeks...

This breathless rush of words -- it's not political, but it is political, but oh those chatterers will seek to spin it, against which I chatter and spin... -- shows what the term "willing suspension of disbelief" means to these people: not just a temporary, conditional acceptance of a staged reality, but a descent into global fantasy.

Conservatives of this class (and not all conservatives belong to it, I hasten to remind you) are, like the rest of us, deeply affected by art -- but their creed allows them only one response to any surge of deep feelings: find a way to feed it to the Borg.

At one point, Lopez cries out, "movies matter" -- and if you have any acquaintance with her work, and that of her colleagues, you know exactly what she means: movies matter because they can be used as propaganda. Hamartia, catharsis, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human -- yeah yeah, blah blah, but Ollie Stone's latest pic will "partner" well with "Rick Santorum’s Thursday speech at the National Press Club" in this lot's never-ending PsyOps simulation.

I love Oliver Stone for many reasons, perhaps especially for writing one of the funniest lines in the history of cinema ("Daddy, are they going to kill us like they killed President Kennedy?"). But if I find myself wondering what effect his next film will have on the price of wheat or a Congressional election in Pennsylvania, I will call you and ask you to kill me. (I believe in you! I know you can do it!)

UPDATE II. I may have gotten the JFK quote wrong. This site has it as dialogue between Garrison and his kids:

"Are we going away, Daddy?"
"I don't know, Jasper."
"Because of Kennedy?" "Will the same people kill us, Papa?"

Still pretty funny; I guess I was gilding a lily. I love moments like that, and am grateful to commenter Nance for giving us another Ollie howler ("Well, Jim Morrison! You've ruined another Thanksgiving!").

When life gets me down, I think of Juliette Lewis telling Woody Harrelson, "Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad!" Then everything seems better.