Posted on 10/13/2005 9:41:15 PM PDT by nunya bidness
Writers are traditionally concerned with people. These are the bones of their work. To understand people properly they had to understand the society in which they live and the economic conditions under which they live.So any writer worthy of the name studies the problems. Probably he became a writer because he's a humanitarian. There is at least a streak of altruistic idealism in him. They have become troubled about poverty, especially when there is such a discrepancy; where a man making twenty-five hundred dollars a week is next to a man making twenty-five dollars a week.You hear in Hollywood more than anywhere else the word "break" used. If you ask a successful person in Hollywood how he got there, he will never say, "I got there by hard work and personality." He will say, "I got the breaks." Of course, hard work and personality count a great deal, but "breaks" count, too.
We think, there but for the grace of God, go I, when we somebody not so successful. As a result, a person in Hollywood is really interested in bringing up the general level of the people around him. He knows he can't do it individually. He knows it wouldn't do any good to give five bucks here or there. He looks around for any organization in which he can work that does these things. He finds Marxism because it is waiting for him.
The Communist Party has laid clever fly-traps for him. Those organizations are all around him. Their overt purpose is certainly good. They not only attract those who become Communists, they attract many who never become Communists, but give Communists their time, their work, and their money.
Just another celluloid leftist lie-fest..*this* one,
by Buffoony Clooney.
Senator Joe McCarthy
-and-
the HOUSE Un-American Activities Committee?
I am no student of the early Cold War, but even one so ignorant as I finds it... odd... to see a Senator alleged to be involved in a House committee
History is written by the victors and in this case revisionist filmakers.
Now, now, now...why should anyone let facts get in the way of a good slander?
Note: The following text is an exact quote:
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http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/s05100051.htm
ASSIST News Service (ANS) - PO Box 2126, Garden Grove, CA 92842-2126 USA
Visit our web site at: www.assistnews.net -- E-mail: danjuma1@aol.com
Monday, October 10, 2005
EDITING OUT THE FACTS:
George Clooney's Deceptive New Movie 'Good Night, and Good Luck'
By Dr. Tom Snyder, Editor of MOVIEGUIDE®
HOLLYWOOD, CA (ANS) -- There are few facts on display in GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, actor George Clooney's liberal version of CBS-TV news commentator's Edward R. Murrow's 1953 feud Joe McCarthy, the fiercely anti-Communist senator from Wisconsin.
The movie, opening Friday Oct. 7, presents the feud as an emotional battle of political rhetoric, with the loser, of course, being Sen. McCarthy. The real historical facts, however, are not so clear.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK opens with Murrow giving a speech in the late 1950s warning about the confusion of TV news with entertainment.
Cut to 1953 at the height of Sen. McCarthy's war against Communist and left-wing security risks in the United States government. The newsmen working with Murrow on his SEE IT NOW news commentary show are itching to confront the Senator.
At the height of Sen. McCarthy's campaign warning about potential security risks in the U.S. Army, Murrow does a show about a young lieutenant mustered out of the Army because of the allegedly left-wing activities of two family members. Murrow does another program on McCarthy's own speeches, ending with a strong editorial commentary against Sen. McCarthy and offering to give the senator a whole half hour to respond. McCarthy's response includes an attack on Murrow's own left-leaning political background. The next week, Murrow responds by castigating Sen. McCarthy further and claiming that McCarthy got one of his facts wrong. In the wake of the controversy, Murrow's show loses its sponsor and CBS cancels it, claiming that the show's ratings are not good enough.
Filmed in black and white, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK is well-produced and well-acted. Of course, the movie does not tell viewers that McCarthy had nothing to do with kicking the young lieutenant out of the Army. Nor does the movie show that McCarthy's response to Murrow's attacks included a lot more details about protecting America from Communist infiltration than just questioning of Murrow's own leftist political motives.
Furthermore, in researching this controversy, MOVIEGUIDE® could find no support for Murrow's claim in the movie that McCarthy got one of his facts wrong, namely that, contrary to what McCarthy claimed, Murrow was never a member of a radical, pro-Communist, Marxist union group called the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In fact, Wikipedia on the Internet lists Murrow as a famous member of the group, but Wikipedia apparently is not always reliable. Be that as it may, MOVIEGUIDE® could not find a second source for the movie Murrow's assertion about Murrow and the IWW.
Thus, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK sticks mainly to the radical liberal, pro-Communist, revisionist version about the controversy surrounding Murrow's programs and Sen. McCarthy. As such, it offers mainly emotional, bombastic arguments and lots of style, but not much substance.
Despite some minor problems with her book, MOVIEGUIDE® recommends people read Ann Coulter's bestseller TREASON instead. It offers a more detailed, better researched and more well-rounded look at Sen. McCarthy's career. Despite Coulter's rhetorical flourishes, her book is a good, informative read. It's easier, however, to have a rational argument supported by many facts in a non-fiction book like TREASON than it is in a 90-minute movie like this.
The new visual medium of TV was not kind to McCarthy's campaign stump style of delivery, but the poor man was repeatedly vilified in the national liberal press, which instigated a Congressional investigation of McCarthy's probe of security risks in the military. Murrow was definitely a better communicator on TV than Sen. McCarthy, but Murrow's tactics, as shown by this movie and tapes of his actual work, are just as emotional and bombastic, if not more so.
I've always been puzzled by the national news media's fascination with these McCarthy programs by Murrow and his team. They show a tendency to editorialize rather than use hard facts and rational arguments, and an inclination to avoid honest debate. Ironically, the same journalists who extol Murrow seem to look down their noses at Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, whose news commentaries and editorials are far more journalistically and factually sound, though perhaps just as bombastic (in their own way), as Murrow's.
We now know, of course, that McCarthy was mostly right the United States government and many left-leaning organizations in the United States were indeed infiltrated by Communist spies and pro-Communist stooges sponsored and/or supported in one way or another by the Soviet Union. For example, at least one person that Murrow and American liberals defended, Laurence Duggan, was indeed a Communist spy and later worked openly in leftist, Neo-Marxist circles. We also know that a black woman, Annie Lee Moss, working in the Code Room of the Pentagon, whose famous testimony is featured in George Clooney's movie, was indeed a Communist Party member in the mid 1940s. Also, Annie Lee Moss really did receive a DAILY WORKER at her actual address in Washington D.C., despite her demure, intentionally humorous protestations.
It should also be pointed out that McCarthy's usual strategy was not to openly identify someone as a Communist spy or a security risk, because he wanted the government authorities to investigate such matters themselves and decide, one way or another, by legal means, whether a particular person was indeed a Communist spy or a security risk. In fact, in the case of the Army lieutenant mustered out of the Army, the lieutenant's lawyer, working within the law and with the authorities, was able to acquit his client fairly quickly. It is good that the news media brought the man's case to light, but the fact remains, McCarthy had nothing personally to do with the man's case, one way or another! Thus, the liberal, elitist news media tried to use the man's case to conduct its own witch-hunt of Sen. McCarthy and his colleagues and supporters.
Finally, please note that Murrow's reports on McCarthy include little, if any, contrary arguments, facts or interviews from McCarthy or any of McCarthy's strongest supporters. Neither, regrettably, does George Clooney's revisionist movie. That hardly strikes MOVIEGUIDE® as honest filmmaking, much less as objective, fair-minded, fact-finding journalism.
** You may republish this story with proper attribution.
Thanks for your contribution.
The world has to be reminded of the nature of shame if only to remember that once it made us human.
Communism was and is unsustainable as a model; a world where shame is but a footnote in history books will prove to be unsustainable as well.
ok, allow this poor ignorant (but suspicious) wretch to take a wild shot at the pot:
If I were to Google up the term(s) of Senator McCarthy and compare them with the dates between which the HUAAC was active, would I discover that they were not concurrent?
This movie is gonna bomb and will hit the $1 K-mart DVD bin.
You're very welcome.
It wasn't McCarthys anti-Communist crusade that brought him down, it was his tactics.
His "tactics" were not helped in the least by the fact that he definitely was not telegenic. The writer says he used police state tactics. Anyone who watched any of the hearings at the time or who has seen film of the hearings will note that witnesses, et al. reeked of contempt for the man -- that's some "police state!"
"Most powerful man in the Senate?" He was hated by the mainstream having been called a Nazi since as a Congressman he was critical of the way U.S. occupying forces were mistreating German regular army prisoners, none of whom were Nazis.
Yes, many if not most of us little people thought he was correct. He was.
1) It's the ''Venona'' project and the ''Venona'' papers, not ''Verona'', which codeword term dates to the 1940s. The release of the KGB's Venona documents in 1994-1996 merely confirmed what every non-Soviet sympathiser knew; there were a shjtpotful of Soviet agents in every European and N. American government...practically none of which have been brought to book even yet today. Possibly because of apologists such as yourself, but who knows for certain, eh?
2) Stalin didn't starve the kulaks (small private landowners/farmers)except some of those in the Ukraine (see below). He simply liquidated the Great Russian and White Russian, and Don kulaks if they refused to surrender their land to the kolkhozi, the so-called collective farms. The people Stalin forcibly starved were the Ukranian people, for numerous reasons, not least of which was the enthusiam of the Ukranians for the German invasion of Russia in WW I, plus their firm loyalty to the Orthodox church. Recommend you see the excellent and brutally accurate documentary film ''Winter of Despair'', made decades ago, and which (of course) the LSM wouldn't dream of allowing the American people to view.
3) Stalin ranks in second place as the greatest mass murderer in history. Mao killed at least 3 of his citizens for every one that Stalin killed (or caused to be killed, same thing net-net-net). Pol Pot, btw, holds the all-time record for the highest percentage of citizens deliberately killed by their government.
HUAAC: 1945-1969 (to 1975, under a new name)
Tailgunner's terms: 1947-1957
well, they are concurrent.
They might be, but McCarthy was a Sinator (no typo), and had nothing to do with HUAC.
Obviously, Nixon made many enemies from that initial confrontation and to this day he stands as the American bolsheviks' greatest triumph.
Well done, and many thanks, Cindy!
You're welcome SAJ.
well, attributing a HOUSE committee to a Senator is patently ludicrous.
as i just discovered, the HUAAC/HUAC came to being in 1945 and stemmed from an earlier House shindig which began in 1938.
One whopper I know lefties spout is blaming McCarthy for the "Hollywood Blacklist" - an outcome of the HUAC dating to October 1947, whereas McCarthy did nothing worthy of note against communists until 09-FEB-1950, his famous "I have a list" speech concerning Reds and security liabilities in the State Department.
now, If I can find all this out in an easy ten minutes, sitting in my bedroom at my desk in my damned pyjamas...
why cannot well-paid Hollywood hacks do as well?
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