Recently, at least if you’re a conservative, writer-director David Mamet has taken on heroic proportions.   And it has nothing whatever to do with his rather second-rate,  obscenity-laced plays and movies, everything to do with a piece he wrote for the Village Voice. In it, he announced that, at the age of 60, he has decided to stop being a liberal.  It’s always a cause for celebration whenever anyone leaves the darkside, and I suppose if I had ever liked anything he’d written besides the script for “The Untouchables,” I’d be somewhat more excited by his conversion.

The truth is, within 24 hours, half a dozen friends had forwarded me the piece.  What I found odd was that they were so thrilled at the news that not one of them even took exception to the paragraph in which Mamet compared a president, George W. Bush, he had always considered a monster with a president, John F. Kennedy, whom he had always revered.  I guess he was striving for irony in listing similar things each had done.  But how was it he could write, “Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs” and have nobody raise an objection? [more]