Last week, I wrote about how the professional left was attacking Clint Eastwood’s new biopic about Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. American Sniper is almost exclusively about the struggles and heroism of one remarkable man who fought in the Iraq war, but the film’s critics can’t seem to forgive the fact a film was made about the war on terror that mostly eschewed politics and didn’t go out of its way to attack Bush-Cheney and/or denounce American imperialism. The film is now a bona fide phenomenon. After having the largest opening weekend for a January film ever, “[the film’s second weekend] $64.6 million tally is off just 28 percent from the movie’s opening frame, which is the best second weekend hold ever for a movie that opened above $80 million,” according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.
As such, the attacks on the film just keep coming. Over the weekend, Bill Maher called Kyle a “psychopath” on his HBO show, which prompted this response from Howard Dean: “There’s a lot of anger in this country, and the people who go see this movie are people who are very angry,” Dean said. “… I bet you if you looked at a cross-section of the Tea Party and the people who go to see this movie, there’s a lot of intersection.” Actor Gary Sinise posted this public response to Dean:
