Hollywood's Double Standard: 'Redacted' Praised, '24' Has to Move Left

The writers' strike is giving conservative fans of "24" a temporary reprieve from a maddening, preachy plots planned in the new season. So argues Bryan Preston at Hot Air, noting that Hollywood praises liberal anti-military, anti-war on terror fare like "Redacted," while it can't abide a pro-American, pro-war on terror far like "24," despite the latter being vastly more successful as a commercial enterprise than the former.

Preston notes that Day 7 of "24" opens by featuring lead character Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) defending his actions before a congressional committee that will doubtless rail against his methods in obtaining intelligence from terrorists. He notes this merely gives fictional liberal senators air time to echo arguments "24" fans here time and again from real life liberal politicians and the mainstream media (emphasis mine):

By saying Jack has “nothing to apologize for,” they’re saying in essence “We’re sorry but we can’t just unwrite all those tough things he did in the so-called War on Terror and we can’t just send him off to Africa so we’ll have him defend them.” This will give the producers the chance to write speech after speech denouncing Bauer, the CTU and the real war, but mostly the real war, and invent maverick Republican senators and liberal Democrat senators and cast them as the real good guys. There will probably be a “you can’t handle the truth” moment, but only to give Jack the chance to bellow before the whole thing comes to some weak and unsatisfying ending. And read between the lines and that female character will be played by Janeane Garofalo, moonbat extraordinaire. 24 not only seems to be going very very far from the norms and ideas that fueled its early seasons, it seems to be morphing directly into Redacted lite.

Speaking of which, by the way, there has still been no reported Hollywood soul-searching over Redacted or any of the other anti-war troop-smearing films that have been released in the past couple of years. Depicting the troops as rapists and war criminals is evidently fine with Hollywood; depicting a strong and ongoing response to terrorism, not so much.

As long as this attitude remains prevalent in Hollywood, long live the writers strike.