John Nolte on Palin, Sorkin and 'The Social Network'

The screenwriter's obsessively dark rage towards Gov. Palin hints of deeper issues
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After watching “The Social Network” again, after screenwriter and admitted cicaine fiend Aaron Sorkin’s "obsessively dark rage towards Governor Sarah Palin," Big Hollywood Editor-In-Chief John Nolte sees an entirely new misogynistic subtext in a story "that even some liberal critics found unsettling" because it portrays women in such a degrading manner:

The furor has has since died down, but immediately after the Oscar-nominated film was released more than one critic pointed out that the female characters in “The Social Network” are mostly beautiful sluts, beautiful crazies or barely-clothed set dressing always getting high or drunk and more than willing to give it up on their knees in a men’s bathroom. There’s also the main character, Facebook Co-counder Mark Zuckerberg, who’s portrayed as a insecure man seething with hostility towards women, especially after he’s dumped by his girlfriend in the opening scene. Sorkin would have us believe that what drove Zuckerberg to create Facebook was a desire to prove himself to that very same girl, while in reality Zuckerberg claims he was with the same girlfriend he has now during that time — an Asian girl named Priscilla Chan (and it’s a couple of Asian girls who take the worst beatings in Sorkin’s film).

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Sorkin punts and blames all of Harvard for what many perceived as the film’s disturbing misogyny (but I thought Harvard was a progressive school?). You see, it’s not Sorkin who has hostility issues towards women, he was simply portraying reality, portraying how intellectuals are bitterly angry that all the pretty girls still want nothing to do with them even though they perceive themselves as Masters of the Universe. Insert: record scratch.

In light of Sorkin’s seethingly vitriolic personal attacks on Governor Palin, does that sound a little close to home?

Since October Sorkin has launched three (that we know of) rages against Palin, none of them based on substance, all of them deeply personal.

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Update: Reader Poll

- JP

Sarah Palin Pwns Aaron Sorkin

"I didn't know anyone ate dogs, tanned the hides, and made boots out of them"
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All that cocaine he snorted must have rotted Aaron Sorkin's brain. Either that, or he has morphed into Disney's famous character Pinocchio. How else to account for his bizarre assertion in a Huff-Posting that Gov. Palin didn't kill that caribou for food, just for fun? Good grief, last Sunday's episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" clearly shows her checking her depleted freezer's foodstock before the hunt and filling it with meat from the caribou she bagged afterward.

Even more evidence of the leftist producer's mendacity or brain damage (or both) is given by Sorkin's curious claim that he couldn't distinguish between Sarah Palin's hunting and Michael Vick's participation in a dogfighting ring, for which he was sent to prison for 18 months.

"So a leftwing Hollywood producer thinks there is no 'distinction' between harvesting healthy, wild organic protein to feed my family and engaging in dog fighting?" Palin said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "I didn't know anyone ate dogs, tanned the hides, and made boots out of them."

Pwned!

h/t: Ian Lazaran

- JP

Quote of the Day (December 8, 2010)

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Jim Treacher at The DC Trawler:

"Why merely whine about being reminded where food comes from, when you can throw a complete temper tantrum? Sure, Palin is like Michael Vick because… well, because Aaron Sorkin doesn’t like either one of them. And Sorkin’s not a hypocrite for railing against the killing of an animal and then going out for a steak dinner, because that would make him a bad person... But look on the bright side: There’s no meat in a coca leaf!"

- JP

Surprise! Jezebel's Anna North defends Sarah Palin's hunting

If you're a meat-eater like Sorkin, quit wringing your hands over Palin's hunting trips
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We can't remember Jezebel, the gossip site for leftist women, ever defending Sarah Palin on anything. But then again, we don't pay close attention to any of the gutter gossip websites that are under the Gawker Media umbrella until one of them gives us good reason to. Gawker's big fail of posting photos of some pages of Gov. Palin newest book (which a judge decreed had to be taken down) before its release was one of those occasions. Now Ana North, a writer for Jezebel, has given us reason again with her unexpected defense of Gov. Palin.

Make no mistake, North doesn't like our Sarah much at all, and she manages to get her little digs in at the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate. But North at least has the intellectual honesty to admit that the attacks on Gov. Palin and her hunting episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" are unwarranted and hypocritical. North singles out screenwriter/producer/cocaine connoisseur Aaron Sorkin, who slammed Gov. Palin for hunting in a recent HuffPo hit piece:

Everybody has a different moral compass when it comes to food. But does feeling a little bit bad about the animals you eat make you superior to someone who feels cool enough about the whole thing to flay a reindeer on television? Sorry, it doesn't.

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Sorkin also says to Palin, "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." But famed ethicist (and vegetarian) Peter Singer made just such a distinction in a 2007 interview: "the aim of a hunter is to kill the animal with as little pain as possible — or it should be. [...] It seems pretty clear that the dogs that didn't fight well that Michael Vick and his associates killed were not killed instantly at all." Singer also says that dog-fighting and hunting "are both really very minor cruelties in the terms of the scale of things. The big thing that is going undiscussed here is the industrial raising of animals for food."

You can talk all you want about how gross it is to butcher an animal on television, or how unseemly it may be to celebrate when that animal dies. But squeamishness and decorum don't help the billions of animals killed in slaughterhouses every year.

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Hunting has its problems too, but if you're going to eat meat, there's something to be said for eating an animal that got to live in its natural habitat and eat its natural diet (rather than, say, the corn-based cattle feed that may be contributing to antibiotic resistance). And while Palin may intend to make political hay out of her caribou kill, she's also clearly planning to eat the beast — she and her dad skin it carefully and she explicitly states that it's going to feed her family.

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But if you're meat-eater like Sorkin, getting your meat in a package from a slaughterhouse is no better than shooting it yourself (provided you hunt in a legal and sustainable way) — and really, it might well be worse. So to anyone who eats factory-farmed meat, quit wringing your hands over Sarah Palin's hunting trips and find something better to criticize her about.

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Related: See also Gov. Palin is a Real Hunter, the most recent in a trifecta of excellent posts by Ron Devito on Sarah Palin and hunting.

- JP

John Nolte unloads on Aaron Sorkin

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With both barrels:

"What’s hilarious is how defensive Aaron Sorkin is at the very mention of Sarah Palin’s name. Obviously Mama Grizzly is so deep in Mr. West Wing’s head that he finds it necessary to defend his Americanism when no one asked (or cares). It is odd, though, how he uses his father’s resume to lay out the case for his American bona fides instead of listing his own selfless contributions to this great country of ours. But I guess, I made a gajillion dollars and spent it almost killing myself with illegal drugs at the Marmont, lacks the patriotic zing the moment requires."

"Who’s the idiot, again?"

"And I love how just before he trashes Palin with a quote taken completely out of context, Sorkin feels feverishly compelled to reassure everyone that 'The Social Network' isn’t political. Guess he’s smart enough to understand the box office fate of openly liberal films not starring smurfs these last few years."

"What a small, insecure little man. Someone should remind Sorkin that this fall, while he’s attending all the right parties to find all the right [backside] to kiss in the selfish pursuit of Oscar glory, Sarah Palin will be out there changing the face of America in ways Sorkin could only dream of as he was conjuring up his fantasy White House while sucking on the bad end of a crack pipe."

Come on John, stop pulling your punches. Tell us how you really feel.

- JP