Greetings puny Earthlings....
I noticed something while cruising the blogs of
Dirty Harry, and Vox's friend the pop-culture maven
Furious D, that there's a controversy brewing over the movie
Tropic Thunder and it's use of the word "retard."
For the uninitiated the movie is a satire of movie stars and the movie business, and features Ben Stiller as a movie star with a sinking career who tries to get an Oscar nomination by making a film called "Simple Jack" where he plays a mentally handicapped farm hand, spewing the sort of holy fool treacly wisdom found only in Hollywood movies about the mentally handicapped.
Now the object of the satire is actors, their insensitivity, ignorance, egos, and hunger for awards, and this point is made by having the characters use the word "retard" in discussing their attempts to land Oscar gold.
Enter Timothy P. Shriver.
He's a Kennedy who inherited the leadership of the Special Olympics from his Mom, and he wants the movie boycotted, and the word "retard"
* banned from the language by government fiat.
He's even bringing out some of the mentally challenged to protest the movie, the general injustice in society, and what I think is more important... INCREASED GOVERNMENT FUNDING FOR THE SPECIAL OLYMPICS.
I'm not questioning his motives, he might honestly be misguided into being offended by something meant to offend actors, but when you look at how the Kennedy clan operates, you can't help but think the word "ulterior" doesn't somehow fit into this situation.
We are talking about the same family where Joe Kennedy promotes
Hugo Chavez's Citizen's Energy like it was a grand charitable gesture of noblesse oblige when in reality, he's pocketing $400,000 grand a year, and he had to take a pay cut, because his predecessor, Michael Kennedy, was pocketing over $600,000 a year in babysitter money.
I'm not saying that Timothy Shriver is up to anything wrong, at least not outside of destroying the right of free speech, I'm just saying that the way he's acting; the grandstanding, the manipulation of the intellectually challenged, the attention whoring, and the desire to tear up one of the fundamentals of western freedom, is just making me a tad suspicious.
Keep watching the skies, because we're watching you.
*(BTW: "Retard" really means "to hold back or delay" and was brought into the language to describe the mentally handicapped because it seemed nicer than "stupid" or "idiot" which were deemed cruel and malicious)