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You know it's amazing, as a kid, the gifts at Christmastime were huge.  You were so excited to open the gifts and see what was inside.  I remember getting Transformers and playing with them ALL day.  And then as I got older, we would get Nintendo games and I would play with them ALL day.  Now it's different.  Now, I just ask for gift cards.  Give me a restaurant gift card, that's what I want.  Then you've got to compete with the family members who are anti-gift card.  They want to get you something real.  Don't you love that?  You end up racking your brain trying to come up with something that you don't really want, just so your family member can feel good about getting you something that wasn't a gift card.  In other words, the gift they're getting you is more about what they want to get you than what you want.  It's a beautiful dance that we do.

But anyway, this year my wife and I made out like bandits when it comes to movie gift cards.  We've got a handful of movies coming to us.  The difficulty now becomes deciding which ones to see.  I'll have some that I like, and she couldn't care less about, and vice versa.  So we try to come up with ones we mutually are interested in.  Of course, when there's one that she really wants to see, or if I do, the other will make the sacrifice and go.  For me, that usually means most of the history related movies that come out.  I'm not into the suspense stuff - don't like the stress.  Most of the comedy anymore is all overly sexual or perverted because Hollywood is so depraved they don't know how to be legitimately funny without being gross or inappropriate.  So I usually lean towards the true story history movies.

But you've got to be careful about those too.  Case in point: iconic liberal Hollywood director Steven Spielberg is coming out with a movie on Abe Lincoln sometime around next Christmas.  The problem isn't necessarily Spielberg, though his biases are pretty well known when it comes to politics.  The problem is that he hired a raving and angry gay liberal by the name of Tony Kushner to write the screenplay.  So what can we expect from this movie?  Think Brokeback Mountain meets Gettysburg:

For a preview of what we might be in for with Spielberg's Lincoln, it's useful to consult this New York magazine article from March 2008. "[Rolling Stone founder] Jann Wenner isn't the only one who finds Barack Obama Lincolnesque in his own origins, his sobriety and what history now demands," it begins. "Tony Kushner is working on a screenplay for Steven Spielberg based on ?Team of Rivals,' Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Lincoln's last two years as president before he was assassinated. Kushner gushed about Lincoln's ability to ?bring people together.'"

 

But, of course, there are some who are simple beyond the reach of even Saint Abe. Namely, today's Republicans. New York asked Kushner whether he thought Lincoln ? "that original Log Cabin Republican" ? would be a Republican today. "Absolutely not," said Kushner. "He was a deeply progressive man and a deep believer in the Constitution. Any party that could make George Bush, who has raped the Constitution, is not one that Abe Lincoln would want anything to do with." And if he were alive today, Honest Abe would be all about Obama: "They're both from Illinois. You can really trace a line from the politics of Lincoln through American pragmatism to the politics of Barack Obama." If that's not enough, Kushner informs us that Lincoln was most likely gay. "I'm struggling with that question while I'm writing it. The historical record is very cloudy. There's possibly some evidence he was bisexual at least."

Why do I have a strong suspicion that the "historical record" as represented by Kushner's screenplay is going to be pretty "cloudy" itself?  We could get into a discussion about Lincoln's fidelity to the Constitution, his "progressive" tendencies relative to what is now known as progressivism, or about Lincoln's belief that Natural or Moral Law trumped the laws of man (any guess how the pro-abort, pro-gay left would feel about that?), but the larger point is that Kushner is to movie writing what Howard Zinn was to history textbooks.  The left doesn't care what actually happened in the past or who the individuals in the past really were or what they believed.  They care about shaping and molding them in the image of modern day left-wing warriors.  They care about warping their histories in order to advance an agenda.  And by completely destroying the studying of actual history in our public schools, they have fertile ground to manipulate the minds of an historically ignorant citizenry that is frighteningly oblivious to their foundations and heritage.

These left wing zealots are a danger and threat to the future of the republic, whether they write fantasies that are held up as history texts by Marxist college professors (see Zinn), or write fantasies that come to life on a big screen by special effects masterminds (see Kushner).  Thankfully, I'm guessing our gift cards will be used up by the time this movie comes out.  Here's to hoping the same is true for most Americans.