Craig Bernthal reviews ...

...Game of Thrones:

Martin’s preoccupation is with the will to power, which he sees continuing endlessly for no rational reason. The plot of A Song of Ice and Fire is a repetition of intrigue, treachery, and the stab in the back. The game of thrones has no point, but the characters cannot stop playing. Hosts kill their guests, guests their hosts, sons their fathers; knights slaughter the innocent, and a medieval Frankenstein patches his monster together in a dungeon. There are no beginnings or endings, just an endless struggle for power, a struggle as inescapable as its consequences. It is history, the nightmare we cannot wake from, just one damn thing after another. It makes for a very long story.

I am so tired of getting "Sunday punched" by things like this.

I've been a George R.R. Martin fan since I was a teenager.  I like the interbraided complexity of his Game of Thrones.  I purchased the first season of Game of Thrones on DVD and I am on episode 9 of 10.

You would think that I would be safe from the gratuitous insults of American liberals in a fantasy world based on the High Middle Ages, but, no, the fargin' liberals have to engage in their monkey-like flinging of feces by fashioning a fake head of George W. Bush and sticking it on a pole with the executed traitors of King's Landing.

[On the far left.]
Can you imagine some show doing that with Obama or Reid or Teddy Kennedy?  No, because it would be properly castigated.

More important, I don't think it would occur to conservatives.  I don't think that conservatives are as political as liberals.  I don't think that conservatives look out at the world and see everything as an opportunity for self-indulgent displays of their political spleen.

In other words, conservatives have a life that is not all about politics.

Glen Reynolds writes:

A JOURNALIST READER WHO I’M SURE WOULD PREFER ANONYMITY WRITES: “I know this game gets tired, but imagine, just imagine the months of fury, the global advertising boycotts, the anguished Senate investigations if a network did this with our current president.”


HBO apologizes and offers a really stupid explanation.

HBO: We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss: We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.

In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.

Right. None of the prop guys, director or anyone else thought it would be "hoot" to put Bush's head on a spike.

If it had been a liberal icon, you can bet it wouldn't have happened.