Christina’s Common Sense

If you’re an avid reader of this blog, or if you know me personally, you can probably tell that military stuff is very important to me. So when I first saw the trailer for Stop-Loss over Christmas break, I immediately knew I was going to despise it. Not only did I have suspicions about its political leanings, I also hate MTV and Kimberly Peirce. However, because it’s important to know what the enemy is thinking, I forced myself to watch it last night.

I tried to keep an open mind. Since I like military movies, I wanted to like Stop-Loss. And as much as I love those who protect my freedom, it’s the truth that sometimes the brass makes mistakes and the GIs suffer. Maybe this movie would help bring awareness to something that needs to be changed.

And it started out pretty well, with soldiers singing Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue,” which is one of the most-played songs on my iPod (shocker, I know). And then it all went to you-know-where.

Political statements aside, Stop-Loss wasn’t a good movie. It just wasn’t. It lost my interest after the homecoming parade and never got it back. I have to say, Ryan Phillippe showcased some pretty significant acting talent in his 180 from Navy Cross recipient John Bradley to simpering deserter Brandon King. It was particularly amusing that he spent most of the movie running from the Army in a pair of BDU pants and a green T-shirt. Not conspicuous at all…

Stop-Loss also makes its main characters into some of the most unlikable characters ever to appear on the silver screen. They look like weak, manipulated wimps. It really should be pathetically easy to drum up sympathy for a PTSD-stricken soldier, yet Stop-Loss managed to render me completely uncaring toward King’s struggle.

The movie’s worst offense is taking the soldiers running from their duty and making them look like heroes. The ones who follow orders look like villains. The only thing that kept me from destroying the screen in front of me was that it happened to be my computer screen and I’m not ready to part with it yet (though it would give me an excuse to buy the Panasonic Toughbook I’ve been lusting after).

So yes, Stop-Loss was a terrible movie and a terrible disservice to America’s heroes. After the movie was over, I ran a Google search for Kimberly Peirce and discovered that she got the idea for the movie when her brother joined the Army after 9/11.

He must be so proud.

If I may boast a bit, I made it myself :).

If I were smart, I wouldn’t have blogged about Iraq two days ago because I would have known that tonight marks five years into the deal. But I’m apparently not smart, so you get two Iraq posts in three days.

Tonight will mark five years since I sat on the floor of my living room watching the first bombs drop on Baghdad and watching to a Fox News anchor report over a video phone.

A lot has changed since then, most of which would be included in this post had I not written about it a mere 48 hours ago. But many things remain the same.

One of these things is the anti-war movement, just as strident today as it was five years ago—or 40 years ago, for that matter. While America’s best have been doing us proud in the Middle East, we’ve had such gems as Fahrenheit 9/11 from the erstwhile Michael Moore, with Fahrenheit 9/11 ½ anticipated later this year. Well-known liberal loon Mike Farrell has put to use all that foreign policy experience he gained playing BJ Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H in a documentary Whose War? Cindy Sheehan has crashed the State of the Union and camped out by Camp David. Stop-Loss, a movie where soldiers desert the Army and don’t get a firing squad is set for release in just a few days.

We should always support our troops, but today is an especially important day to do so. Remember them in your thoughts and prayers, and do everything you can to make sure they know the likes of Michael Moore, Mike Farrell, and Cindy Sheehan don’t speak for America.

When it comes to Iraq, it’s hard to separate the spin from the reality. Many of us—and I was among their number for some time—find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering what to believe. On one hand, our friends in the military tell us that everything’s going well and they’re proud of their mission. On the other, we’ve got the likes of the Clinton News Network and PMSNBC telling us that this is all a catastrophe and we should cut and run before we create more terrorists. You know, like the police create more criminals by throwing people in jail.

Victor Davis Hanson, as usual, brilliantly cuts through the horse hockey to the truth. And I’m not biased or anything just because he’s in tight with my school. Here, Hanson shows us how despite the disastrous reports we get from the mainstream media, our War on Terror in general and Iraq specifically is right and in our national interest.

One of the biggest arguments against the Iraq War is that America is intervening where she has no business. But like it or not, the world has changed since the 1800s. Since the invention of a nasty little bugger known as the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, isolationism isn’t a good idea anymore. The reality is that American intervention is changing minds in the Middle East about Osama bin Laden and suicide bombing. These things made them our enemies, and now they are losing their stronghold on the Middle East. You’d have to be a complete fool—or a liberal—to not see that this is good for America. Iraq is not another Vietnam, and as long as this is the case it never will be.

On the subject of freedom, I want one of these. But I’ll probably have to wait for a cubic zirconia knockoff.

Early this morning, a bomb struck a recruiting station in New York City. Had the explosion taken place during business hours, it would likely have proved fatal to anyone in the building.

I have to wonder why it is that any crime against a black, a woman, a homosexual, or any other professional victim groups are denounced as hate crimes while a bomb in a recruiting station—you know, where people are recruited to defend professional victims’ rights to be professional victims—is called a small bomb that did no damage. People could have been killed, and it attracts less indignation than Paul Shanklin’s parody “Barack the Magic Negro” (which was based on an actual article in the LA Times).

We need know nothing more about where the Left’s loyalties lie than that they are quicker to defend the likes of Al Sharpton than David Petraeus. Since liberals don’t seem to hold our military in very high regard, I wonder how they’d like to live in a world without it? Hm?

To quote Albert Brennaman in Hitch: “Think it over.”