When will the crazy stop? Rep. Allen West is a man -- a two-hundred-poundish, handsome, intelligent man, with his own ideas, experiences, memories, loves, dislikes, hatreds, prejudices, whathaveyou. He is not a canvas.
Yet that's what lots of people want him to be. Since he first hung up his dress uniform, the fringier parts of the American right have turned him into a kind of human Rorschach Test; a screen upon which to project whatever transient desires most obsess them.
Check out this cracked effusion from Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, penned by Michael Moriarty:
Nothing so reinforces the essential integrity of the American character than another viewing of the American classic, From Here To Eternity. Seen through contemporary eyes, it looks like an extended examination of Lt. Col Allen West's entire experience with the Third Millenium American military...Funny. As I recall it, the villains in From Here To Eternity were boxers, not Marxists. That said:
Why was [Allen West] singled out for an "enforced resignation"?
The collective bargaining and cronyism of the Third Millenium, American Army-at-War was seen spitting on its own best soldiers because of the New World Order's increasingly Marxist agenda.
In the film translation of... From Here To Eternity, individual freedom and individual responsibility are the heroes battling the community organizing pressure and collective bargaining going on under the guidance of Captain Dana "Dynamite Holmes"...
...There are prophetically Marxist-style cabals and pressures existing to both force Prewitt, the Montgomery Clift character, to box, and to "transform" Frank Sinatra's Maggio [character] into a coward and someone ashamed of his Italian roots. Maggio would rather die, be beaten to death, than succumb to any bully.
Neither effort succeeds, of course, and both Maggio and Prewitt, true to themselves, die as heroes, fighting not only their enemies abroad but the very "community organizers" and "collective bargainers" that can so obscenely crop in any military setting.
No, no, no!
Just because Republicans don't like "community organizers" this year, 'cuz Obama was one, and just because the stink wafting southwards from Wisconsin has soured them on "collective bargainers," doesn't mean they get to use those labels to retroactively tar everything they've ever disliked. That's silly, dishonest, and horribly, horribly stupid.
Listen, Moriarty: You can grouse about Marxism all you want. I'll join you. But let's be sane. Allen West wasn't booted from the army for not being sufficiently Marxist. If you'll recall, it was Stalinists who fingered, detained, and tortured "enemy collaborators" on scanty evidence. Americans are supposed to be better than that. Right?
Also -- Allen West's military career was not ended by "collective bargainers" and/or "community organizers." Unless you think the Geneva Convention was a plot hatched by grassroots literacy and anti-crime activists, the insinuation is meaningless.
Dear reader, please recall that Andrew Breitbart is a Very Big Deal. Big Hollywood is not some kind of lunatic's demesne, frequented exclusively by the tinfoil hat crowd. These are the same people who brought down ACORN. And now they have decided that collective bargainers and community organizers killed Montgomery Clift. This is a weird, weird world.
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