Friday April 16, 2010

AFTER T-DAY. Scanning the headlines at Big Hollywood after a long absence is kind of disorienting:

SUCKER PUNCH SQUAD: Villain in Will Ferrell’s ‘The Other Guys’ Is Friends With….Dick Cheney!

‘Glee’ Sucker Punches Republican Fans

HOLLYWOOD INSIDER: Hate the Pope, Love Polanski

Hrm…? The Leftist Entertainment Media’s Sure Excited About Will Ferrell’s New Movie

You forget that there are enough people out there with this utterly distorted sense of grievance -- this notion that Hollywood is a branch of the government and, like all the other branches, is constitutionally obliged to fulfill the desires, not of its paying customers, but of an agitated "patriotic" minority filled with alleged boycotters of its product, or be crusaded against -- to sustain a website.

But it occurs to me that this is kind of how the Tea Party operates, too. Its members' notions of their own importance come from the attention of the same MSM outlets they usually profess to hate and disbelieve. The government is not taxing most of them very differently from the way they've been taxed for years, but now that Democrats are in office they're suddenly mad as hell about taxes.

And though they're railing against officials who were democratically elected by majorities or pluralities of their constituents, they are not surer of anything than that they represent the true will of the people. It's normal for the defeated opposition to feel confident of victory in the next election, but these people seem to believe that they won the last one.

That's probably why they go for the Revolutionary War get-ups; they honestly think the elected government wasn't elected, at least by any voters they would recognize as fellow citizens, and that the people voted in a year and a half ago are usurpers -- from Kenya or wherever.

Democrats were alleged to have felt that way about the contested 2000 Presidential election results, but they never behaved anything like this.