Out of the Newsroom

Certainly, we couldn’t have seen it when he was Joe Buck in “Midnight Cowboy”. Probably not as the real life Pat Conroy in “Conrack”. Ditto as Luke Martin in “Coming Home”, because for heaven’s sake he was hooking up with Jane Fonda! And for shit’s sake, he played the captain of the Greenpeace ship in “The Rainbow Warrior”!

But maybe the signs were there all along.

After all, he did make “The Tin Solider”, which some poor sap on The Internet Movie Database suggested might just be “the worst movie ever made.” Within a few short years, he turned out to be the completely two faced Jim Phelps, opposite Tom Cruise in the big screen version of “Mission: Impossible”

That should have been our first big clue.

Then he was a general with a dual identity, in charge of a secret operations execution squad who frames Keenan Ivory Wayans in “Most Wanted”. A murdering politician who goes after Will Smith in “Enemy of the State”. A major league dick of a high school coach in “Varsity Blues” who delivers this bit of script that would be so profound in 2009: “The hard work of so many, sacrificed by the disrespect of few.”

He was also legendary Basketball coach Adolph Rupp in “Glory Road”, Not to mention being a Pope (“Pope John Paul II”), the father of Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander”, and even the father of Angelina Jolie’s Laura Croft, Tomb Raider–which is a bit ironic, since he is Jolie’s real life father, though notably she decided not to take his last name as her own.

But you would think that having been the actor who so admirably channeled a performance as President Franklin D. Roosevelt in “Pearl Harbor”–that maybe, just maybe he would understand the challenge of somebody becoming the Chief Executive of United States at a time when the economy is sliding fast into the toilet from the colossal bunglings of your predecessor, a Republican who history would judge as one of the weakest Presidents in the nation’s history.

Furthermore, you think being assuming the identity of FDR on the big screen would help you understand that the decisions you have to make to try to save the country from a deepening depression are sometimes as unpopular and unsupported as say…the government seizing all of the gold owned by private citizens.

So maybe someone can figure out exactly what the hell happened to Jon Voight to make him host a Washington dinner last night to raise $15 million for Conservative candidates like say, Newt Gingrich and Sara Palin, and during his remarks actually call out the current occupant of the Oval Office–one who was actually elected to the office, rather than winning it at an audition, as a “false prophet.”

In fact, Voight went on to peg most all Democratic leaders as being responsible for the “downfall of the country”.

Fortunately, Voight’s current acting gig, the one he is doing in Hollywood mind you, is as a madman and insurrectionist Jonas Hodges, on the TV series “24”.

Who says life doesn’t imitate art?