And an aiding-and-abetting Enemedia right along with them....
Film Praises John Lennon as 'Anti-War Hero'
U.S. conservatives were outraged when country music band the Dixie Chicks criticised President George W. Bush.
But a new documentary about John Lennon and his run-in with the Nixon administration over the Vietnam war suggests Bush got off lightly.
David Leaf's "The U.S. vs. John Lennon", screened at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, uses footage not seen before and news clips aired for the first time in decades.
Lennon's widow Yoko Ono allowed Leaf and co-director John Scheinfeld to use her library of images and the former Beatle's music in a 100-minute documentary that portrays a turbulent United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It opens with Lennon seeking to soothe U.S. opposition to his comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
He is shown staging his famous honeymoon "bed-ins" for peace, addressing huge rallies, performing a concert for a jailed friend, criticising Nixon in interviews and funding an international advertising campaign called "War is Over!"
Leaf said his documentary was relevant today, with the debate raging over the invasion of Iraq and what some see is the erosion of civil liberties in the United States.
"The film itself isn't designed to comment on the world today," Leaf told a news conference. "However, there is no way to watch the film without hearing the echoes in the past of what's going on in the world."
Leaf said the film only won financial backing and the support of Ono following the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
"It took the events in a post-9/11 America to give people a sense that this was not just a story rooted in the past but had a contemporary resonance and needed to be told."
Dramatic newsreel from the United States and Vietnam is mixed with Lennon footage and interviews with commentators and politicians of the day in a film that paints Lennon as an anti-war hero and the victim of a vindictive government.
Leaf conceded it had been difficult to find former members of Nixon's government or people supportive of the Vietnam war, although he defended the film as balanced.
"It was a challenge to get anybody who was on the right side of the political spectrum. G. Gordon Liddy [a Nixon advisor who was jailed for his part in Watergate] was just about the only one from the Nixon administration from that era who would."
In the opposite corner are an array of established liberal figures including Gore Vidal, who at one point says: "Mr. Nixon and President Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing."
The final part of the documentary deals with Lennon's long legal battle against deportation, which he finally won in 1976.
The U.S. vs. John Lennon is due for release in the United States in September.