Thursday, April 27, 2006

Thanks for clarifying that.

The deservedly esteemed publication, The Economist, ran a little review of the film V for Vendetta which I only got around to reading today in spite of it appearing a month ago. The said: "As for the dystopian fable, only fans of detention centres, torture, unfettered government suveillance, screaming mad television pundits and laws against alternative lifestyles will find anything here that could possibly offend." Now if that isn't a challenge to the Bush administration I don't know what is!

In fact the Mullahs on the Religious Right were spitting blood over the film the moment it was released. Christianist Ted Baehr, of the Christian Film & Television Commission, fused and fumed about the movie on a loony right website called World Net Daily. He said the film is a "vile, pro-terrorists piece of neo-Marist, left-wing propaganda filled with radical sexual politics and nasty attacks on religion and Christianity." Even though the plot comes from a story that is 20 years old Baehr whines that it is a "thinly veiled attack on the War on Terror now being waged by Prime Minister Tony Blair in Great Britain and President George W. Bush in the United States."

I guess The Economist hit the nail on the head. The only people offended by the film are fams of "detention centres, torture, unfettered government suveillance, screaming mad television pundits and laws against alternative lifestyles." Now is it clear why conservatives are not within the classical liberal tradition?