One major theme of the Values Voter Summit last weekend was how Liberal Hollywood has destroyed our values. In general, there was a lot of martyrdom on stage -- from Giuliani's persecution at the hands of editorials from The New York Times down to the actors/directors/etc. working in the filthy, filthy water of the Left Coast. You can slake that stuff on at red meat conferences because people eat it up like liberals eat up jokes at the expense of George W. Bush. It's shtick.

It can also be an excellent sales pitch. As Andy pointed out, Giuliani did receive praise from The New York Times, though it wasn't because he did stuff that was liberal. But Rudy's not going to say that because it undermines his conservative credentials. And as Julian Sanchez notes, the inability of religiously themed films to find major distribution in the U.S. isn't because of liberal Hollywood's agenda to make the kids gay, but why not pretend? That way, people will feel obligated to see the movie, if only to stick it to all those lib-rawls:

"Major Hollywood distribution companies" never pick up little thoughtful foreign films like Bella. Independent distributors like Lion's Gate or quasi-autonomous niche distributors affiliated with one of the bigger companies do, as you can easily confirm by looking at the last dozen winners of that Toronto Film Festival People's Choice Award. An award, incidentally, which is suggestive of box office potential, but hardly dispositive: There are plenty of hits (Life Is Beautiful, Whale Rider, Hotel Rwanda, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, American Beauty), but also a fair number of misses: Tsotsi grossed just under $3 million in the U.S.; Zatôichi less than $900,000; The Hanging Garden, under a million. Even the successful ones, though, aren't getting distributed by Paramount.