An imperfect rhyme for an imperfect schmuck. Mickey Kaus joins with Bill “Whore told me I had a big penis” O’Reilly in castigating The Bourne Ultimatum as un-American because, among other things, it fails to show uncritical enthusiasm for such all-American activities as waterboarding. The Mickster tempers his assault by saying that, no, it’s not just the lack of enthusiasm for waterboarding that’s pissing him off, but “the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right.” (Mickey’s bf and ital) In a further, damning aside, Mickey notes that the film is a big hit overseas.
Well, any film that is a big hit overseas is an unpatriotic piece of shit to begin with, but where does Mickey get the idea that 1) a film has to be “redeemed” in the first place, by anything, and secondly why it has to be redeemed with “any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right”? If Mickey had any sense of cinematic history, or the damn ethos of the times in which we live, he’d know that the “Bourne” series, created by the late Robert Ludlum, was built around the idea that the CIA was total crap, which has been the argument of, I don’t know, about 10,000 films in the last 40 years, from Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite through Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power. And yet the Republic stands.
Afterwords
For a piece I wrote asserting that the CIA isn’t total crap (a review of The Good Shepherd), go here.
Mickey, when he isn’t assaulting illegal immigrants on the street or critiquing the rear end of the latest BMW, appears on blogging heads with lefty enabler Robert Wright. If you want to watch two balding, middle-aged men in flannel shirts sitting in their basements yelling at a TV camera, this is the place to go.*
*I once told Mickey the blogging heads thing wasn’t working for him and he should stick to prose. He glared at me wildly and shouted “And give up show business?”
