Great flick

Argo

But the 5 minutes hate stuck on at the beginning to make sure audiences blamed Eisenhower, the CIA, and America for the horrors of the Iranian Revolution sucked.

It’s a good film that didn’t deserve to be Best Picture.

Lincoln was better, and I don't know that it should have been Best Picture, either.

Here is a completely silly review in The American Conservative

“Argo” Backfires as Campaign Ad, Misfires as Film

A waste of ink with no real complaint about the opening attack on American policy.

George Clooney might have written this review in the same magazine by Scott McConnell that pretty much endorses the film’s attack on Eisenhower for installing the Shah and the Shah for bringing on the clericalist fanaticism of the Iranian Revolution.

(That's right. Liberals fault the Shah for resisting the mullahs and attempting a measure of Westernization.)

OK, even Truman didn’t want to do it.

But no mention of the leading role of the Brits?

No mention of the locals who actually willingly and successfully carried out the coup?

No mention of Mossadegh being in bed with the Iranian communists and the danger of his taking the country into alliance with Russia?

Not that I think IKE should have done it, but still.

What ‘Argo’ Gets Right

A much better review in The Weekly Standard

Escape from Tehran

But it spends too much time irrelevantly plugging the Israelis for their raid on Entebbe and the TV movie about it.

Though the complaint about the lefty propaganda at the outset is apt.

I searched NRO about a dozen times in different ways and found nothing about Argo.

Nothing at Human Events, either.

The fact remains that the collapse of the Shah’s government, the triumph of the Islamists, and the ferocity of the hatred for America and all things American by the Ayatollah’s regime were all entirely predictable, by the time the Ayatollah had set up shop in Paris.

The humiliation of America at the hands of these savages, still in power, was a horrific, shameful disgrace made possible in large part by the very wide swath of American opinion that even then put and kept America in the wrong about Mossadegh and the Shah.

And yet the major media did their level best to lull America to sleep and deny the danger, beginning when the Ayatollah was leading the clerical revolutionaries of his country from Paris.

I thought at the time that if the CIA were really the murderous and omnipotent gang of Nazis the left painted them to be the Ayatollah would die assassinated in Paris, with no real harm done.

Come to think of it, why didn't the Shah's Savak do it?

Didn’t happen.

Damned shame, in retrospect.