The University of Michigan has dropped a campus showing of “American Sniper” after Muslim students complained the film made them feel "uncomfortable."
U of M is roughly 40 miles away from Dearborn, a city which is famous for having one of the largest Muslim populations in the U.S. But U of M is also a university, where once upon a time young people went to have their assumptions challenged, their horizons broadened – which just might leave one feeling "uncomfortable."
What is the moral of the smash hit movie American Sniper? According to an editorial in Thursday's edition of the New York Times, our country's “gun-friendly culture” leads to “insane behavior” that not only threatens the lives of gun owners and their families, but also makes a case for stronger gun-control legislation.
“You know the movie, right?” sarcastically asked Gail Collins, who covers American politics and culture for the Times. “It has not only been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar; it could wind up selling more tickets than the other seven nominees combined.”
On Tuesday night, Lawrence O’Donnell devoted nearly four minutes of MSNBC show The Last Word to reading from and professing his complete admiration for President Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father as the “most honest,” “open,” “artful,” and “finest literary work ever authored by a President of the United States.” He spent no additional time on the book’s many inconsistencies, which stands in stark contrast to O’Donnell spending 32 minutes and 22 seconds of his program on January 27 and 28 obsessing over the late Chris Kyle’s book (turned hit movie) American Sniper and bringing on multiple guests to discredit Kyle and his story.
NBC foreign correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin suggested that Chris Kyle, the real "American Sniper," was a "racist" whose military missions were nothing less than "killing sprees." Despite receiving thousands of phone calls, NBC has yet to issue an apology.
Vice Magazine has posted a long, fawning interview with limousine leftist documentary maker Michael Moore, infamous for his recent Twitter attack on U.S. Navy Seal Chris Kyle. Maintaining the offensiveness, Moore found American Sniper to be a racist "mess" and discredits the heroism of marksmen like Kyle, calling snipers "chicken-shit," saying the U.S. was the bad guy in Iraq. And on his Facebook page, Moore compared his conservative critics to the Islamic terrorists of ISIS.
Before he signed up to play Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in American Sniper, Bradley Cooper put on weight, studied with a voice coach, and learned to put a bullet into a target from 800 yards away. But he told People magazine the most lasting lessons he learned were about the struggles of everyday military families.
"I had an appreciation for veterans before this, but what I definitely did not know is the toll that it takes on the family," the Best Actor Oscar nominee said. “People were willing to express themselves in a format that they would never do normally....But because they saw Chris’s story, they were willing to say, ‘Thank you for putting a guy I can relate to up there and have it be something right away that I know is accurate.'”
In an article for Salon, Penn State professor Sophia McClennen claims the box-office blockbuster has “no nuance, no context and no subtlety” and that its director, Clint Eastwood, “represents a dark, disturbing feature of the GOP mind-set.”
In a nasty screed against American Sniper on Wednesday, Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi claimed the Oscar-nominated film was "almost too dumb to criticize" but proceeded to do so anyway, declaring: "Even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two."
The late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle is recognized as the most effective sniper in U.S. military history. Max Blumenthal, the son of liberal journalist and adoring Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, only has a reputation for being a jerk who trolls conservative conventions and writes books with titles like “Republican Gomorrah.”
Twitchy reported on Friday that Blumenthal on Twitter compared Kyle to Lee Boyd Malvo, the “brainwashed” teenage half of the Beltway sniper team. Both were “mass murdering snipers.”
CNN's Anderson Cooper targeted former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura in a Tuesday post on Twitter, after a jury awarded the ex-governor of Minnesota over $1.8 million in damages in a defamation lawsuit against the estate of former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. Kyle's widow, Taya Kyle, is the executor of her deceased husband's estate.
In the Tweet, Cooper expressed his disbelief over the lawsuit, and wondered what was wrong with Ventura: [post below the jump]
Today, our friends at Twitchy reported that Lee Judge, a left-wing political cartoonist, illustrated a depraved caricature depicting the grave of ex-sniper, and Navy SEAL, Chris Kyle – with the caption “if only there had been a good guy around.” This is wholly insensitive, and a craven attempt to smear an American hero who was tragically slain by a fellow veteran whom he was helping cope with PTSD.
But this is hardly the first time Judge has inked a cartoon that transgresses the bounds of decency in service of a left-wing political argument. For example, when the NRA first proposed armed guards in schools back in December, Judge thought it was clever to suggest that Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shooting, would have been the perfect candidate for such a job. In another cartoon, the Kansas City Star cartoonist also insinuated that guns rights activists only care about their firearms, and not protecting children.