O'Reilly advances Voight's false claim that "Pravda said that we were amazingly speeding toward Marxism at an amazing rate"

we would be wise not to ignore the claims of a towering intellectual such as Jon Voight.

Amazingly speeding at an amazing rate that amazes you? AMAZING!
Jon must be promoting "Coming Home 2: Wearing Out Your Welcome".

So let's see what kind of headlines we have at Pravda Online at this particular moment:

"Russian fishermen catch squeaking alien and eat it"

"Vegetarianism proves to be perversion of nature"

"Soviet Union witnessed invasion of US-made UFOs in 1980s"

"Russian geneticists to reveal alien's DNA mystery"

Sources, Shmources, if it's on the internet, it must be true.

What's Jon doing on the Fox Comedy Channel, anyway -- I thought they didn't like Hollywood?

Then again, they've already had the following on for "expert commentary":

- Pat Boone
- Maria Conchita Alonso
- Danny Bonaduce
- Omarosa
- Ted Nugent
- Chuck Norris

I can now see why Angelina Joile doesn't want to talk to her father. i myself have to puit him on my list of nutty people. It is possible sometime in the future the US population will consist of carbohydrate materials robots and one charismatic leader allowed to dismantle the Constitution. It is important noone is allowed to rewrite history creating plausible arguments to do so.

Voit has long proven himself to be a talented and highly accomplished actor, but his political discussions show him to also be a grumbling, tinfoil hat-wearing, paranoid narcissist. It's actually quite sad to see him slowly descending into mental illness. He now expresses regret for his work in Coming Home, and thinks that the Viet Nam war was a noble endeavor. He wishes to cleanse universities of what he now perceives as the corrupting inluences of liberal professors by firing all those who dare to question the heroic myths of American history.

In other words, Voit has mutated from a respected artist into a snarling, hard-lining, black-shirted wingnut par excellence.



Alas.

I'm a believer that when a person dies, you remember whatever good things about them there might be, and you stow the bad stuff, because they're dead now, and why let the bad stuff outlive them to continue plaguing you after they're gone...

Before this particular actor died, he made a couple of awesome movies.

'Deliverance', for the way it made a white water rafting trip into such a threatening drama (and I would have altered the part where they're confronted by the two guys in the woods, it didn't have to be done like that), and the whole business in the background, of most of the county being destined to rest at the bottom of a great reservoir, and the "Dueling Banjos' part was one of those things you see in movies that make you wonder at how inspired artists must be, to create such things...

Also 'Catch-22', and the character this particular actor played, the Officer who was a capitalist extraordinaire, who was hell bent to make money off the war, buying and selling whatever it took, women weapons and even a bombing mission... and it's hilarious when the Officer is stuck with having traded for tons of cotton, and then the price of cotton collapses, and so he gets the idea of coating little cotton balls in chocolate, and feeding them to the men... and when he's told that the men won't go for it and will never eat the stuff, the Officer replies something along the lines of "They have to, it's their duty, it's part of the mission and they have to do their part, and it's good for America" or something like that, it's hard to remember every word correctly when you're laughing your head off, which the whole movie did that, told dark truths in funny ways...

Anyway, that's what I'd rather remember about this particular actor before he died, and not dwell on the obvious life and career crisis he suffered from in his later years, that made him go public with his fear-driven political opinions.

You have to admire a group of people who think that judges should not, under any circumstance, view foreign law as advice or a reliable indicator of outcome and then turn around and think an unknown foreign author can tell us what way we're headed. This is a Foxworthy moment, in the sense of Jeff not News.
Here's your sign.

Voight was pretty convincing this season as the right-wing nutbag badguy on 24. Who knew he believed the tripe he was spouting in that role?