thedrifter
12-01-05, 07:07 AM
Bruce Willis: Hollywood Patriot
By Karina Rollins
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 1, 2005
Bruce Willis, famed action hero and one of a handful of Hollywood patriots, is gearing up to make and star in a movie about some real-life heroes—American soldiers risking and giving their lives in the continuing struggle in Iraq.
The film is to be based on the heroics of the Deuce Four, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, which has seen plenty of action fighting vicious killers in the infamous northern Iraqi terrorist stronghold of Mosul.
In Willis’s movie, U.S. soldiers will be portrayed as courageous and honorable, and their cause as noble—a matter of course during World War II movies, but not something one expects from today’s Hollywood with the likes of Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, and Michael Moore, whose extremist one-dimensional leftism is taken as deep intellect and moral superiority by almost everyone in Tinseltown.
There have been a few wonderful recent efforts at honoring the sacrifice and courage of America’s military men—Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers on the Vietnam War, and Saving Private Ryan and the TV series Band of Brothers on World War II. More common, however, are movies like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or Apocalypse Now, which go out of their way to portray evil or deranged Americans on the loose in Vietnam.
A supporter of the Iraq war, Bruce Willis says he is in talks for a movie about “these guys who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom.” Not the most eloquent statement to be made in honor of our fighting men, but it gets the point across. Willis went to Iraq—with his rock band, the Accelerators—in 2003, where he observed that there is more to post-war Iraq than the car and roadside bombs deemed newsworthy by the mainstream media. As he recently said during an MSNBC interview, “I am baffled to understand why the things that I saw happening in Iraq, really good things happening in Iraq, are not being reported on.”
Far from playing down the danger from terrorists, he is personally dedicated to finding the top killers and masterminds. In 2003, he offered $1 million of his own money for the capture of Saddam Hussein. He will pay the same amount for Osama bin Laden; his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Compare that to what another big-screen tough guy, Sean Penn, who visited Iraq twice, spends his money on. In October 2002, during the much-hyped build-up to the war, Penn paid $56,000 for an open letter to President Bush in the Washington Post to deplore the president for a world where “bombing is answered by bombing, mutilation by mutilation, killing by killing.” In May 2003, he shelled out a reported $125,000 for a full-page rambling essay in the New York Times to justify his visit to Iraq that same month, where, on this enemy soil, he gave a press conference to place the blood of innocents on American hands.
Hollywood arch-leftist Tim Robbins wrote a play, “Embedded,” that derides the positive news coverage of U.S. soldiers during the war. Another Hollywood darling, Janeane Garafolo, called U.S. troops in Iraq “occupiers” and “trespassers.” Penn, in his Times ad, wrote that the “flag that took me so long to love, respect, and protect, threatens to become a haunting banner of murder, greed, and treason against our principles, honored history, Constitution, and our own mothers and fathers.”
Why does it matter what these people think or say? Because they have the ears of our youth, the entire country, and sometimes even the world. Because these repulsive messages reach our troops. Because it is an insult to the men and women serving their country so honorably to tell them they are doing so under a flag that represents “murder, greed, and treason.” Morale matters. It matters so much that it can determine victory or failure. And most of Hollywood is doing all it can to destroy the morale of their own country’s military.
That’s why, as blogger Michael Yon, a former special forces green beret embedded with the Deuce Four, says, “it’s just so good to see a man of [Bruce Willis’s] stature throwing his entire weight behind our people who are in harm’s way.”
Ellie
By Karina Rollins
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 1, 2005
Bruce Willis, famed action hero and one of a handful of Hollywood patriots, is gearing up to make and star in a movie about some real-life heroes—American soldiers risking and giving their lives in the continuing struggle in Iraq.
The film is to be based on the heroics of the Deuce Four, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, which has seen plenty of action fighting vicious killers in the infamous northern Iraqi terrorist stronghold of Mosul.
In Willis’s movie, U.S. soldiers will be portrayed as courageous and honorable, and their cause as noble—a matter of course during World War II movies, but not something one expects from today’s Hollywood with the likes of Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, and Michael Moore, whose extremist one-dimensional leftism is taken as deep intellect and moral superiority by almost everyone in Tinseltown.
There have been a few wonderful recent efforts at honoring the sacrifice and courage of America’s military men—Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers on the Vietnam War, and Saving Private Ryan and the TV series Band of Brothers on World War II. More common, however, are movies like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or Apocalypse Now, which go out of their way to portray evil or deranged Americans on the loose in Vietnam.
A supporter of the Iraq war, Bruce Willis says he is in talks for a movie about “these guys who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom.” Not the most eloquent statement to be made in honor of our fighting men, but it gets the point across. Willis went to Iraq—with his rock band, the Accelerators—in 2003, where he observed that there is more to post-war Iraq than the car and roadside bombs deemed newsworthy by the mainstream media. As he recently said during an MSNBC interview, “I am baffled to understand why the things that I saw happening in Iraq, really good things happening in Iraq, are not being reported on.”
Far from playing down the danger from terrorists, he is personally dedicated to finding the top killers and masterminds. In 2003, he offered $1 million of his own money for the capture of Saddam Hussein. He will pay the same amount for Osama bin Laden; his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Compare that to what another big-screen tough guy, Sean Penn, who visited Iraq twice, spends his money on. In October 2002, during the much-hyped build-up to the war, Penn paid $56,000 for an open letter to President Bush in the Washington Post to deplore the president for a world where “bombing is answered by bombing, mutilation by mutilation, killing by killing.” In May 2003, he shelled out a reported $125,000 for a full-page rambling essay in the New York Times to justify his visit to Iraq that same month, where, on this enemy soil, he gave a press conference to place the blood of innocents on American hands.
Hollywood arch-leftist Tim Robbins wrote a play, “Embedded,” that derides the positive news coverage of U.S. soldiers during the war. Another Hollywood darling, Janeane Garafolo, called U.S. troops in Iraq “occupiers” and “trespassers.” Penn, in his Times ad, wrote that the “flag that took me so long to love, respect, and protect, threatens to become a haunting banner of murder, greed, and treason against our principles, honored history, Constitution, and our own mothers and fathers.”
Why does it matter what these people think or say? Because they have the ears of our youth, the entire country, and sometimes even the world. Because these repulsive messages reach our troops. Because it is an insult to the men and women serving their country so honorably to tell them they are doing so under a flag that represents “murder, greed, and treason.” Morale matters. It matters so much that it can determine victory or failure. And most of Hollywood is doing all it can to destroy the morale of their own country’s military.
That’s why, as blogger Michael Yon, a former special forces green beret embedded with the Deuce Four, says, “it’s just so good to see a man of [Bruce Willis’s] stature throwing his entire weight behind our people who are in harm’s way.”
Ellie