Adam McKay’s Vice — the Oscar nominated bio-pic about Vice President Dick Cheney — is a remarkably revealing film. In the same way you can watch Hallmark movies to better understand some women’s daydreams, you can watch Vice to get a gander at the absurd, small-minded and hate-filled imaginings of leftists.
To say the movie’s political views are simplistic is to insult simplism. Cheney is a conniving moral monster who bombs nations for profit. His president, George W. Bush, is an idiot, whom Cheney leads by the nose. Democrats are good. They put solar panels on the White House roof to save the planet! Republicans are bad. They do mean things for mean reasons because they are mean.
It’s a child’s view of the world, full of tendentious factual distortions and lies. But then director McKay is a Socialist, so he is a child in effect, or at least he knows what a child knows about economics, human nature and history — namely nothing.
What is so revealing about the film though is that it’s about Bush. Not Donald Trump. Bush. It’s a reminder that the hatred and rage, the wild charges of racism, and the madcap conspiracy theories with which the left has disgraced itself during the Trump administration are not anomalous, not directed at the outsized Trump specifically. This is just how the left thinks about the rest of us in every administration all the time. Republicans are either stupid like Eisenhower, Reagan and W, or they are evil like Nixon and Cheney, or they are both stupid and evil like Donald Trump.
And it’s not just the politicians either. This is how the left sees you too. Stupid, evil or both.
The fact that this silly film has been nominated for a best picture Oscar is a message from Harvey-Weinstein-World to half of America. The message is two words long. The second word is you.
If Vice is how leftists imagine life, it’s no wonder they have to spend so much time and energy preventing their childishly black-and-white viewpoint from being debunked by the complicated truth.
They have to take pains to insure that every movie, every television show, every comedy act, every news program, every college course reflects their ideas and only their ideas. They have to invent and propound primitive racist theories like Intersectionalism that give them license to categorize all disagreements as hateful. And if even that’s not enough, they have to hire friends to commit hate crimes against them so the world seems to look the way they think it looks.
They so surround themselves with people who agree with them, so immerse themselves in their imaginary narratives, they don’t even know they’re demonizing their opponents, they just think (as one leftist says in Vice) they’re relating the simple facts.
When actor Jussie Smollett reported the hate crime that police now say was an elaborate hoax, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin mourned, “This is America in 2019.” When media race scammer Nathan Philips started a scene with some innocent Trump-supporting Catholic school kids, CNN’s Ana Navarro falsely described the incident as, “Native-American elder taunted by racist MAGA-hat wearing teens…”
These people don’t even know that their brains are suffocating in the plastic bag of their own narrative. Who would tell them? They have demonized, blacklisted and condemned everyone who disagrees with them. They have chased them out of Hollywood. They have banned them from speaking at colleges. They have de-platformed them on social media.
While Vice is Oscar-nominated, the TV mini-series Path to 9/11 will not be released on DVD because it accurately depicts Bill Clinton’s failure to kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance.
While it becomes more and more clear that the Justice Department’s coup attempt against Donald Trump is one of the great scandals in American history, “journalists” are spending their time speculating on whether Donald Trump is a Russian spy.
Desperate to protect their simplistic imaginations from the healthy debate and interchange of the real and complex world, leftists have transformed themselves into willful idiots. They don’t know what they don’t know. And they don’t know that they don’t know.