An Oscar Blacklisting Made in D.C.

Dan Henninger has a few thoughts about the Oscar blacklisting of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathyrn Bigalow.

Suddenly it was a film about waterboarding, rather than what Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal produced: The story of U.S. intelligence officers spending years digesting an incomprehensible flow of half-baked data, making mistakes and wrong calls, some getting blown up themselves by suicide bombers and finally, after three of them ride around teeming Peshawar in a Jeep with some tracking device, they nail the identity of bin Laden's courier. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was dead. That's "Zero Dark Thirty."

But not for Dianne Feinstein or the Hollywood hundreds. Here's her denunciatory letter's best part: "The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America's values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience. We cannot afford to go back to these dark times. . . . You have a social and moral obligation to get the facts right."

It is always comical to be lectured by U.S. Senators like Feinstein about our "moral obligations" when they can't even meet their legal obligations to say... come up with a budget.

Meanwhile, Feinstein has little to say about the president's drone program that kills not only al Qaeda operatives but untargeted and innocent men, women and children. Instead she deems to lecture and marginalize one of the few filmmakers in the business today who is sympathetic to the tough job of protecting the country.

Zero Dark Thirty is not the film Feinstein and company says it is. That a few Hollywood has-beens would side with Feinstein's and her criticisms is hardly surprising. The rest of us shouldn't be so gullible.