Hollywood goes Washington (subtitled: WWJT? -- Who Would Jesus Torture?)

First there was "The Path to 9/11" ABC's $40 million wet kiss to revisionist Republicans who see our Dear Leader as a superhero wearing a cape and holding a Bible. The King George edition. Typical dialogue on ABC mini-series: CIA agent: "I have Osama bin Laden in my gunsights and I wish I could kill him but President Clinton has insisted we read him his Miranda rights, call Alan Dershowitz and provide him with Halal food and a copy of the Koran." Now we see how Hollywood is really going Republican.

From the New York Times today, "Hollywood took another step toward America's vast and apparently growing Christian audience on Tuesday, as 20th Century (shouldn't it be 21st Century?) Fox unveiled a new division, FoxFaith, that will release up to a dozen religious-oriented films each year." In one of the first new releases, "Jesus: The Resurrection and Payback," the Messiah, having been tortured and placed into "stress positions" turns the tables on his Roman torturers and murderers by employing the Christian-based "alternative interrogation techniques," advocated by President Bush, on his former jailers. "It's all in compliance with the Geneva Convention," says the future King of Kings. He then explains the convention he attended was actually in Geneva with the Shriners. And that the loud music, sleep deprivation and cold temperatures they experienced was about the same as they would employ on the Romans. They decided to the new rules over a Sabbath dinner. It's all legal now so get out the water and boards and hoods and have at it the most famous son of Nazareth.

In the U.S. or should I say in the formally secret gulags run by the U.S., Donald Rumsfeld wonders if he "stand(s) for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours (for the detainees)?" That and waterboarding. Christians supporters of Bush support torture. Or maybe how they rationalize it is that with Christ it was torture and with Mohammed the cab driver turned in by the Hatfields or the McCoys or the Husseins it's "alternative interrogation methods" because we're doing it not those savage Romans 2000 years ago. Remember, there is no "Thou Shalt not employ alternative interrogation methods" in the Ten Commandments so it's all kosher so to speak.

Add to that the altering of history that Hollywood is obviously copying from the Bush administration. "CBS Paramount Domestic Television, a unit of CBS, is digitally remastering all 79 episodes of the original [Star Trek] series to enhance the show's 1960s-era visual effects with 21st-century computer-generated graphics. Digitally created images will replace the miniature-scale models used for exterior shots of the various spacecraft on the show, including Kirk's Starship Enterprise and the enemy war vessels of the alien Klingons and Romulans. Shots of distant galaxies and planets also will be touched up with computer graphics to give them greater depth. The flat matte paintings used as backdrops on the surface of the strange new worlds visited by the Enterprise crew will be digitally enhanced to add texture, atmosphere and lighting."

"Nothing really has changed except for the fact that it's just prettier to look at," John Nogawski, president of CBS Paramount Domestic Television, said in a recent conference call with reporters." Yes, prettier to look at just like when we don't include car bomb deaths and executions to the body counts in Iraq to make the level of violence seem "prettier."

So history will now be revised to be propaganda of the ruling Repubicans, Evangelical Christians will get their own production studios and everything else will be "enhanced" and "digitally altered" like airbrushing "enemies of the state" out of "Enemy of the State." They used to say Washington D.C. was just like Hollywood oly with higher ceilings. Now Hollywood is just like Washington only with lower standards.