Redford Using His Lincoln Assassination Film to Bash America?

On June 24, 2010, I had a post on Big Hollywood that examined Robert Redford’s support for a moratorium on offshore drilling, his belief that Dick Cheney was behind the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and his ongoing criticism of the way George W. Bush handled Katrina. Then, on July 29, 2010, I had another post on Redford which detailed his anger toward the successful Republican opposition to President Obama’s energy bill: a bill that would have “necessarily” caused electricity prices in the U.S. to “skyrocket,” according to Obama.

In both posts the reader should have picked up on one overarching theme: namely, that Redford exemplifies the liberal habit of putting ideology above people, and destroying the common man in the process. (For example, who stands to lose jobs by the tens of thousands when a drilling moratorium is in place if not the common man? And who would suffer most from skyrocketing home electricity bills if not the common man?)

To be honest, some of what I covered in those two posts was so “out there” that I thought Redford couldn’t get any crazier. However, he proved me wrong with the recent premier of his film “The Conspirator,” when he found a way to use the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to criticize the Bush Administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

According to Betsy Sharkey, the LA Times writer who interviewed Redford about the film, the way the government’s reaction to Lincoln’s assassination “[placed] constitutional freedoms at risk” has an “eerily prescient” quality when viewed through the lenses of 9/11. In other words, seeing Redford’s portrayal of the U.S. government overreaching (or almost overreaching) its constitutional bounds in 1865 to preserve order is supposed to make movie goers finally realize that Bush was a bad man who overreacted to 9/11.

This is ridiculous. What’s Redford going to do next? Make a movie about the assassination of JFK, the subtext of which proves that Dick Cheney is still running Halliburton from an undisclosed location?

Although Sharkey gave Redford the opportunity to explain away these ironic overtones to 9/11 in “The Conspirator,” Redford would only say that the story does “[relate] very much to the present,” but “it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves how.”

What I’d like Redford to do is to make a movie that covers all the constitutional rights Bush took away from us, and let the audience “decide for themselves” on that. And while he’s scratching his head trying to think of even one right we lost under Bush – even one – the rest of us can say thanks again to the man who had the courage to stand on the rubble of the World Trade Centers and said: “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.”

When Bush took his stand, he stood not just against the terrorists, but against spineless liberals like Redford who still believe the best way to defeat an enemy is by using their artistic perch to ignore their many sins in order to criticize America.