Contributors
Doug Gamble- Contributor

Doug Gamble is a former writer for President Ronald Reagan and resides in Carmel. [go to Gamble index]

A Landmark In The Culture War
Canceling of Reagan miniseries a blow to power of the Hollywood left.
[Doug Gamble] 11/13/03

There are times in the ongoing culture war when the significance of certain battles can be pinpointed.

For example, the extent to which conservatives were losing became clear in the days following May 9, 1992, when the vice president of the United States was held up to national ridicule for suggesting that most children are better off having two parents instead of one, something that would have been accepted as a given in the days before liberalism wrestled society to the gutter. After Dan Quayle gave his so-called Murphy Brown speech, in which he criticized the media for glamorizing single motherhood and downplaying the responsibilities of fathers, he was bombarded with derision so intense that even the White House of President George H.W. Bush was reluctant to defend him.

But now another date may be recorded as the moment when the pendulum started swinging in the opposite direction: Nov. 4, 2003, the day CBS was forced by an angry outcry to scrap a cowardly character assassination of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a TV miniseries. Ironically, CBS is the same network that gave the country Murphy Brown.

I am not the first to observe that liberals and conservatives in America are now engaged in a bitter, new civil war, one in which, like the war between the North and the South, the future of the country is ultimately at stake. The vision of Hollywood liberals is a virtually defenseless America where anyone with conservative views is delegitimized, patriotism is mocked, traditional values are destroyed, the culture is coarsened, God is eliminated and, in the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, deviancy is defined downward, all wrapped up in European-style socialism.

Hollywood is both a major combatant and a major battlefield in the new civil war, and production of the Reagan movie - an attempt to paint over history with a brush of lies - was valuable in its stark revelation of how Hollywood liberals use propaganda to fight it.

With the bumbling, clueless Democratic Party at least temporarily incapable of undermining the current President Bush, the Hollywood Party has become the de facto official opposition. Through news coverage and entertainment venues, the leftist media has greater means to influence the hearts and minds of Americans than Howard Dean has.

The Reagan movie represents a microcosm of the Hollywood Party's agenda, arrogance and cruelty. Surely the openly gay producers, Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, insisted on Reagan being portrayed as homophobic, when evidence to the contrary exists.

The actress who played Nancy Reagan, Judy Davis, said she hoped the movie would teach Americans a lesson about choosing leaders more carefully. And James (Mr. Barbra Streisand) Brolin said he based his portrayal of the now-incapacitated Reagan on a puppet in a British TV comedy show.

Like Brolin, Reagan was once a washed-up actor, but, unlike the Hollywood leftist, he did something meaningful with the rest of his life. While a major part of Reagan's legacy is a role in tearing down communism, Brolin's legacy will be playing a role aimed at tearing down Reagan.

Any Hollywood viewing parties planned for this Sunday's previously scheduled airing of the Reagan movie are now cancelled, along with the high-fives. If actor George Clooney had intended to entertain party guests during commercial breaks with jokes about Reagan's Alzheimer's affliction the way he joked about Charlton Heston's, they will have to wait for another time.

The Hollywood left finally went a lie too far, and although it was conservatives who led the charge against the CBS travesty, I have to believe the cause was joined by fair-minded Americans of all stripes who were outraged at this twisting of the knife. Perhaps, like Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the original Civil War, CBS' white flag of surrender will prove to be a turning point in this new one.

Doug Gamble has written for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and other prominent Republicans.

Copyright 2003 Doug Gamble