Geraldo Rivera took issue with Rolling Stone author Matt Taibbi’s article that calls “American Sniper” a movie whose politics is so “ludicrous and idiotic” that it’s on the same level as the “walnut-size mind of the president that got us into the war in question.”
“I like Matt Taibbi and the Taibbi family,” Geraldo Rivera said on “Fox & Friends” on Friday. “But this is also a very naive and distorted view of war fighting — I’ve said that police work and war fighting — if you haven’t been there you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This kind of disrespect … what people have to understand is when you’re in the brutality of war and you’re trying to take out a specific bad operator who’s going to do awful things, that is a lot better than bombing a whole neighborhood and getting all the collateral damage,” Rivera continued.
In his piece, Taibbi perceives Hollywood at its worst.
“The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried,” he wrote.
“‘Sniper’ is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.”
Taibbi also took to Twitter Friday morning to defend his stance on “American Sniper.”
So many conservatives are sending box office figures to me as proof that AS was a great movie. Were they as convinced by Avatar’s numbers?
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 23, 2015
Watch the video below at about 3 minutes and 26 seconds in.