***UPDATE 5:44pm: This post was edited for clartity.
The first thing I noticed about Aaron Sorkin’s hilariously bitter and angry HuffPo article aimed at Sarah Palin (but you knew that when I said “bitter” and “angry” ) is that in his profile photo Sorkin’s not wearing those asshole glasses he’s so famous for. How could he see the birdie? Another first is that for once Sorkin didn’t pull his usual schtick of reaching back to his ancestors to prop up his own personal bona fides, as though Grandpa Joe’s military service somehow makes this reformed (so he says) drug-addict some sort of super-patriot. However, we must admit that the removal of the glasses combined with the end of those rhetorical feasts on the corpses of his betters were both excellent choices — and we here at Big Hollywood applaud him. And so on to the business at hand…
What is it about Sarah Palin that so gets under Sorkin’s skin? Or is the cultural bigot so desperate for this year’s Best Screenplay award that his first mercenary impulse is to further ingratiate himself with the Hollywood elite by cruelly and publicly lashing out at this mother of five — and in turn all hunters and most of the Middle Americans who know and love them.
Here’s how Mr. West Wing begins, by quoting a Sarah Palin tweet:
“Unless you’ve never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation.”
You’re right, Sarah, we’ll all just go fuck ourselves now.
A wiser man would’ve stopped there, but Sorkin is not a wise man nor is he a good man nor is he a thinking man. Instead, he goes on to admit he enjoys leather shoes and the taste of meat and the starflowers that pop off in his head as the cocaine hits the pleasure senses of his brain (that last part’s my own interpretation of the subtext), but…
What he hates is that Sarah Palin (and most every other hunter in the world) dares to enjoy the hunt.
I’m able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I’ve tried and tried and for the life of me, I can’t make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I’m able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though…
Money quote alert…!
….I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.
Translation…
Hunters who enjoy hunting are immoral (Note to Aaron: that would be all of them).
Asshole-glasses-wearing screenwriters made giddy by the thought of human beings being shot-gunned in the face because he disapproves of what gives them pleasure are … moral.
Which begs the question: What’s worse for society? People throughout the world who enjoy the sport of hunting animals and have since the beginning of time. Or people who enjoy, say, years-long Hollywood binges on the same illegal drugs that fund the same murderers who spread their poison on to our children’s playgrounds and schools? Has Sorkin ever lashed out so viciously at illegal drug abusers? I’m gonna go out on a Google-less limb and say no.
Let me repeat the irony because it’s richer than the bullying bigot of a hypocrite serving it up: A degenerate drug addict is lecturing others on their habits and what they find pleasure from. Of course Sorkin thinks he’s cutting that criticism off at the pass with this pitiful disclaimer:
Let me be the first to say that I abused cocaine and was arrested for it in April 2001. I want to be the first to say it so that when Palin’s Army of Arrogant Assholes, bereft of any reasonable rebuttal, write it all over the internet tomorrow they will at best be the second.
The left’s favorite ploy: It’s okay for me to be a raging hypocrite because I admit to being one.
Furthermore, Sorkin acts as though no one watched last Sunday’s program and lies with the kind of shameless audacity only a reformed illegal drug addict could. Comparing what we all saw Sunday evening on TLC — comparing Sarah, her loving father and their friend Becker to Michael Vick is nothing short of a lie. Hunting an animal is not torture. Enjoying the hunt of an animal is not torture. Watching the sanctimonious “West Wing,” however…
Aaron Sorkin is nothing more than a bigot, no different than some smug loser who mocks what he sees while watching another culture enjoy something foreign or different to them.
Sorkin may have fooled himself into thinking he’s earning Academy cred by lashing out at Sarah Palin, but in the furtherance of serving her country yet again, Palin takes the hate to expose the Hollywood bigots — and this time it’s one who’s own selfish, narcissistic pleasures have funded nothing less than evil.
If Sorkin opened his elitist mind he might learn something from Palin, and not just about fashion eyewear.