A sock in it, you shall put.

In the course of reading reactions to Revenge of the Sith, I’m seeing something odd: conservative commentators bitching about the film because they’ve chosen to read it, much in the same way that they read seemingly everything, as an anti-Bush polemic.

To which I say, oh, shut up already.

Way back in 1977, the original damn film — before Lucas even retitled it A New Hope and appended “Episode IV” into the opening crawl — established that the Empire arose from the ashes of a failed Republic. It was always going to be about a democratically-elected leader making himself an Emperor through war and nefarious action.

Which, I suppose, makes Lucas a friggin’ genius. I mean, this filmmaker from Modesto was so prescient that he was able to start laying the groundwork for a allegorical space-opera polemic about our current President, over twenty-five years before our current President was ever elected!

I guess these folks are mad because Lucas had to trim a subplot from Attack of the Clones, in which a Coruscant news reporter named Rath Danner is disgraced and forced from his job, for running-time reasons. It didn’t advance the narrative. You know, the “narrative”. Wink wink.