What Libertas Taught Us All

I talked yesterday about what may be the demise of Libertas, a website that claims to be a, "A Forum For Conservative Thought On Film." Unfortunately, it's mostly an exercise in right wing scolding in which we're all told that George Clooney is Osama bin Laden's favorite actor and WALL·E was paving the way for the country to be taken over by the dreaded Sierra Club/PETA Coalition. Oh, it also told us all what was on TCM that night for those of you who don't get TV Guide, watch the TV Guide Channel or have access to TVGuide.com. Of course, most of that came from their former main blogger, a guy who worked under the pseudonym of Dirty Harry. I shared my guess yesterday as to why they let him go and I still think it was a mistake. Maybe the guy who took over the majority of Harry's blogging duties, Jason Apuzzo (who's always been the site's editor) shared most of Harry's views but throughly lacked Harry's style. Compare their takes on the WALL E controversy. Here's Apuzzo:

Conservatives are understandably up in arms about what is apparently depicted in this film (Earth as Matrix-style, hyper-corporate, eco-apocalpytic wasteland), although we’ve been getting this sort of thing from Hollywood for quite some time.

*Snore* Hmm? Is he done? It's a bunch of blah blah blah, yada yada yada standard right wing blogger rant. Now read Dirty Harry:

It was fascinating to sit in a banquet room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and watch a bunch of liberal journalists at work. If you’re asking how I know they’re liberal … did you miss the “journalist” part? All of us had seen Wall-E the night before on the Disney lot. All of us had felt the eco message. All of us had heard, “Stay the course.”

Man, I'm out of breath. In one paragraph he trashes liberals, labels everyone who's not him as being part of some left-wing Borg Mind and manages to saddle WALL·E with the label of "Tree Hugging Bush Hating Al Gore Loving Economy Destroying End Of America Polemic" and, as I said, HE DID IT ALL IN ONE PARAGRAPH.

And yes, I'm not really being fair to Apuzzo since I selectively pulled those quotes out of context in order to make my point. You know who taught me how to do that? Dirty Harry, that's who! What have Jason Apuzzo and his site, Libertas, taught me? Nothing as cool, I can assure you, but Jason has taught me something and, now that Libertas is approaching what may be its end, I'll share it with you. Ready? The lesson that Libertas has taught me that will remain useful for as long as I live is this:

RED TEXT ON A BLACK BACKGROUND IS A SIGN OF MENTAL RETARDATION!

Honestly, what the fuck were you people thinking? The only thing that comes to mind is that you saw this on millions of Geocities pages back in 1999 and thought, "Yes, yes, this is the height of web design! I will never forget the sheer awesomeness that is red text on a black background!" And you never did. The only people today who still use red text on a black background are World of Warcraft guild websites and they use it to share with the world phrases like, "OUR L33TNESS SHALL PWN ALL N00BZ AND WILL SPREAD OUR UBERNESS ACROSS EVERY SERVER." Why didn't you just go all the way and have the red text flash? Maybe code the theme song of 300 into a midi that plays nonstop and can't be shut off? Or maybe just put the whole page into a dozen different frames?

So there you have it, folks. We all now know that if our goal is to make people think that we're the stupidest people on the planet, all we need do is put red text onto our black backgrounds or, as I shall say it from now on, just do it like Libertas.

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