Never the less it's still a good movie. I enjoyed it.

Director Ron Howard was trying to convey how role reversals occur in unintended ways during high conflict. The key stretch of dialogue comes at the very end when Nixon/Frank Langella, ensconsed at his San Clemente estate, expresses the view that he was more suited to journalism and that Frost posesses the instincts of a politician. The irony was meant as a compliment and one can't help but feel it rings true.

My censored profanity was meant to point out how obvious the point “the Left dominates Hollywood” is. I hope thoughtful discussion can continue.

It strikes me that your reaction to The Passion is emotional, at least in a large part. Frankly after some of the hysterical reviews, I was expecting more of a wallow, and less of the theology Gibson explicitly covered, so my reaction was somewhat different than yours, just on that level, no doubt.

I thought we were having a fairly good discourse, but perhaps I was mistaken.

We can get into a debate about “The Passion” if you really want to. A big part of my opposition to it is that it fits into a Christian tradition of emotionally manipulating people into a religious tradition. I was a really passionate evangelical Christian for 5 years. And one thing that I reflected on when leaving the literalist form of the faith for the more mystical faith I have now was realizing this: the Church and youth ministers in particular often emotionally manipulate people into becoming Christians. I witnessed it time and time again. The church produces an EMOTIONAL experience and then pawns it off as a SPIRITUAL experience and justification for accepting a specific theological vision. “The Passion” does the same thing. I find this to be very immoral and not at all Christ-like.

To dismiss this as a snuff film is to dismiss the millions of Christians who were moved by it– including Christian intellectuals– as those who would enjoy a snuff film. It is part of a thousand years old argument than dismisses Christianity as a “bloody religion” so you have lots of company here.

“Morality” is just a term that is ultimately so vague as to be meaningless in political debates as Left and Right have different definitions of what constitutes “right” and “wrong.” And therefore because it’s vague and ineffective I choose to generally not use it in political debate.

I don’t dismiss the Right/Left issue in Hollywood. Hollywood is biased against conservatives and favors the Left. That’s F***ing obvious. Where Nolte and I perhaps disagree is that he presents the problem as bigger than it is. As I demonstrated with my piece most of what Hollywood puts out is apolitical. And it has to be that way. Otherwise they won’t be able to waste money on their leftist “Lions for Lambs” type propaganda pictures.