Wonkette notes that film critic (and Yale honors graduate) Michael Medved takes Hollywood to task for not being patriotic (where have I heard that before?), blaming “Many of the major stars today [who] have an Ivy League background.” He can’t understand why popular wars like the first Gulf War haven’t spawned more loving coverage, just conflicted works like Three Kings (where even the characters who are only in it for the money end up putting their lives on the line to help some Iraqi civilians), The Manchurian Candidate (which wasn’t so much against the war as it was anti-corporatism), and Courage Under Fire (not that anyone watched it).
In what is perhaps his finest moment of black kettle-calling, Medved blasts Oliver Stone (who attended Yale for a year) for his movie Platoon and a speech he gave nearly 20 years ago when he accepted an ACLU award. After quoting Stone’s criticisms of the military-industrial complex and the Cold War, Medved asks: “Is it any wonder that people who deliver statements like that also feel the need to trash the U.S. in film after film after film?” After his year at Yale, of course, Oliver Stone did a tour of duty in Vietnam and received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Medved, whose jaw-droppingly name-dropping biography notes that he was classmates at Yale Law with Bill and Hillary Clinton (although he didn’t finish his law degree), turned 19 in 1967, the same year that Oliver Stone headed off to serve his country. Medved had a Selective Service “occupational deferment” teaching middle school three hours a day.