What do you get when you mix together a director who specializes in spoofs, the brother of a famous dead comedian, and other Hollywood personalities who don’t buy into Hollywood’s leftist politics? “An American Carol,” the latest from David Zucker, the man who brought you “Airplane!” the “Naked Gun” series and “Scary Movie” films.

The movie is a political satire brought to you by Hollywood conservatives. The words Hollywood and conservatives together make about as much sense as the words black Republican or World Series champion Chicago Cubs together, yet represent a departure from the normal leftist ideology that comes out of Hollywood.

The film, the basic storyline of which follows that of the Dickens’ classic, centers around a documentary filmmaker named Michael Malone, based on a certain real-life liberal documentary filmmaker. In the movie, Malone, who recently released a movie called “Die, You American Pigs,” is on a campaign to abolish the Fourth of July. Enter the four ghosts – John Kennedy, George Patton, George Washington and Trace Adkins, playing the angel of death. The four proceed to educate Michael on the finer points of America and the need for sacrifice and military strength.

Now this is by no means Zucker’s funniest movie, but the real point of the movie isn’t necessarily to get you to laugh, but hopefully get you to think about the cost that’s come with living in a society such as ours, and that Moore and so many others on the far left don’t seem to realize this.

They don’t seem to realize the threat still posed by people who wish to destroy us. They don’t realize that the freedoms they enjoy so much and peace that we all love and they think should be maintained no matter what, weren’t just achieved through negotiations and talking to people, but rather through the use of force, or the threat of it. And it isn’t just Americans who should be thankful for past decisions to use military power, but so many other people in many other nations. Whether it was fighting fascism, communism or modern-day terrorism, the use or the threat of American military might was the primary agent that kept those threats at bay.

Zucker did some thinking of his own several years ago. Like most of his Hollywood colleagues, he was your typical liberal Democrat. After the events of 9/11 though, he had a change of heart. He began to see things, at least in terms of foreign policy, with a more conservative view. He saw the reaction of a lot of his liberal colleagues, and a lot of the liberal Democrats he used to support, and was appalled by it. They thought of these terrorists as rational people with specific grievances, as if rational, sane people would fly planes into skyscrapers, killing more than 3,000 civilians. They believed that somehow America had done something to deserve what had just happened to it.

Instead, he saw those on the right viewing these people as they should be: pure evil with a hate that knows no bounds. It is a hate that exists because we have a different religion, different customs and different beliefs; they are essentially the KKK, just more sophisticated and more murderous.

Like a lot of other people on that day, Zucker was greatly changed. Unfortunately, there are still people like Moore who still don’t understand. They continue to view America as a negative force in the world, chiefly because of George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

They believe that we should defer our decision-making to the U.N. The same U.N. whose “human rights council” consists of such beacons of freedom as Cuba, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and a host of authoritarian African regimes. The same U.N. where in July the Security Council couldn’t pass a resolution, pushed by the U.S., putting sanctions on Zimbabwe after the systematic slaughter of Robert Mugabe’s opposition because of vetoes by the amoral governments of Russia and China. The same U.N. whose resolutions can still do nothing to stop psychotic leaders of Iran or North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons.

America is by no means a perfect nation and everyone knows that. It can probably never be a perfect nation because of the many differing opinions on what perfect actually is. Yet what Moore and so many people on the crazy left don’t seem to realize is that the people in this world are far better off because of America and its military, not in spite of it.

Jordan is a junior in MCB, and would like you to go online and check out the prediction he made at the end of his Sept. 23 column.