Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Assange, The Movie

Given Hollywood’s laudatory treatment of other left-wing villains, it’s only a matter of time before Julian Assange makes it to the big screen.

How long will it be before Hollywood makes a movie glorifying Wikileaks ringleader Julian Assange? Not long! Hollywood, after all, has a long and sordid history of making movie heroes out of left-wing villains, con men and charlatans.

Consider, for instance, Larry Flynt, Harvey Milk and Joe Wilson -- three of the most despicable men ever to walk God’s green earth.

Flynt is a vile pornographer who’s dedicated his life to making the world safe for child porn and female sexual exploitation. Back during the Clinton impeachment scandal, Flynt also disgustingly offered $1 million to anyone who could dig up sexual dirt on conservative politicians.

Yet, in the eyes of Hollywood (em>The People vs. Larry Flynt<, 1996), Flynt is a First Amendment hero who’s forced a hypocritical country (the United States) to realize that freedom of speech is all about debased sexual imagery and the gutting of the obscenity laws.

Harvey Milk, too (em>Milk<, 2008), was a radical extremist who championed homosexual promiscuity. As John Podhoretz has observed in the em>Weekly Standard<, Milk

despised rival leaders of the gay community in San Francisco [whom] he deemed insufficiently revolutionary. He was one of the early users of the reductio ad Hitlerum, throwing the Führer’s name around to discredit and disqualify those who might have the temerity to disagree with him.

Yet in Hollywood’s fictitious depiction of him, Milk is “a martyred saint… He [is] the nicest, sweetest, most caring, kindest, and most well-meaning man on the face of this earth,” Podhoretz writes.

Then, of course, there is Joe Wilson, another Sean Penn Hollywood hero (em>Fair Game<, 2010).

In real life, Wilson is a con artist who’s managed to parlay his minor role as a government functionary into grandiloquent public fame and recognition. This because he and his wife, Valerie Plame, were political opponents of George W. Bush; and they propagated the false notion that Bush “lied us into war” in Iraq.

But Fair Game, the movie, is so egregiously biased that even the liberal em>Washington Post< can’t stomach it. The movie is “full of distortions -- not to mention outright inventions,” explains the Post.

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger.

In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson's reporting did not affect the intelligence community's view on the matter. And an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush's statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

“Fair Game, the film, is not fair,” writes Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “It slanders innocent people caught in a web spun by Joe Wilson to flatter his vanity and that of his wife. But what can you expect from Hollywood?”

May is right, unfortunately: Hollywood’s version of American history is completely distorted and, more often than not, completely inverted. The good guys are depicted as bad guys; and the bad guys are depicted as good guys.

Given this sad state of affairs, the day is not far off, I predict, when Julian Assange will be given the full “Hollywood treatment”: by which I mean, glorified and whitewashed as a plaster saint.

In fact, we can see the etchings of this image already beginning to take shape. Last week, for instance, after being released on bail from a London jail, Assange started playing it up for the cameras. He knows, after all, what Hollywood wants and expects.

“During my time in solitary confinement, in the bottom of a Victorian prison,” he declaimed triumphantly, “I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support.

“And with that, I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter…”

Of course, our Iraqi and Afghan allies whom Assange exposed, and who now have to worry about being woken up at gunpoint in the dead of night, might have a different view of Assange’s “innocence.” But no matter: Hollywood has never before let the facts get in the way of a good left-wing fairy tale; and it’s not about to start anytime soon.

Julian Assange: International Hero: coming to a theater near you, and probably sooner than you might think.

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John Guardiano blogs at www.ResoluteCon.Com, and you can follow him on Twitter: @JohnRGuardiano.