Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The best that can be said of Ron Howard’s film adaptation of Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” is that the film maker has taken a theologically deficient, profane, anti-Christian fictional page turner and made of it a theologically deficient, profane, anti-Christian soporific film. A movie that four decades ago might have been banned in Boston now has been panned in Cannes. Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycut wrote, “For those who hate Dan Brown's best-selling symbology thriller 'The Da Vinci Code,' the eagerly awaited and much-hyped movie version beautifully exposes all its flaws and nightmares of logic.” BBC News entertainment reporter Caroline Briggs wrote, “Scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman has produced a script that is clunky in parts and downright cringeworthy in others." "Nothing works really,” wrote Stephen Schaefer of the The Boston Herald. “It's not suspenseful, it's not romantic, it's certainly not fun. It seems like you're in there forever and you...

There are reasons why President George Bush continues to dance a minuet around his harshest critics: They are not nearly as bright as he is. No one knows for certain where or when the “Bush is stupid” fallacy began, probably among media commentators infested with self importance who think too highly of their own intelligence. Bush’s abuse of the language, his slurring of words – and, of course, that famous smug grin on display whenever he found himself in front of a camera – gave color to the notion, eagerly adopted by his partisan critics, that the president was not up on his Proust. It came as a shock to some of them when they learned, just recently, that Bush’s grades at Yale were slightly better than those of Sen. John Kerry, whom he bested in the last presidential campaign. Apparently, both presidential candidates were indifferent students. Bush’s critics have vastly underestimated him, and they continue their folly – to their peril. Just now, the “Bush is a dummy” crowd is delig...