A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Map Credit: Wikipedia In 1979, Simon and Schuster published Peter Wyden’s Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, a hard-hitting and critical examination of one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s biggest blunders – the failed attempt to topple Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s regime with an invasion force of 1,500 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles that landed at Playa Giron, a beach on the Bay of Pigs, located on the southern coast of Cuba.  (C) 1980 Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster. Planned during the last year of the Eisenhower Administration but never officially approved by the lame-duck President Eisenhower, Operation Zapata was not intended to defeat Castro’s forces at Playa Giron with such a small force. Instead, the Brigada de Asalto 2506 (Assault Brigade 2506) was originally assigned to land at Trinidad, 170 miles to the southeast of Havana. There, the five small battalions would seize the port and airfield, carve out a beachhead, and once a perimeter was secured, a gov...

DVD Cover Art (C) 2012 Cable News Network, Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. CNN Presents: Cold War (C) 1998 Turner Original Productions, Inc.   In 1998, seven years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, CNN and Britain's BBC Two network aired Cold War, a 24-part miniseries co-produced by Turner Original Productions and Jeremy Isaacs, a British producer who is best known for his 1970s series about World War II, The World at War.   The idea of the series originated with Jeremy Isaacs Productions and was financed by CNN founder Ted Turner. Isaacs then put together a team of writers and producers to make 24 46-minute-long episodes that are presented in the same style and format of The World at War. Many of Isaacs' collaborators, including co-producer Pat Mitchell, writers Neal Ascherson and Jerome Kuehl, and composer Carl Davis, had worked on the earlier series. Thus, Cold War can be considered to be a sequel to The World at War.  As you might ex...

Why do some American liberals admire these two Marxist revolutionaries, anyway? Although I used to consider myself a middle-of-the road voter when I was younger, I suppose some of my more conservative friends would call me a liberal. After all, I support women’s rights, LGBT rights, the Civil Rights movement, and I’m very open-minded about sex. I’m also not very religious   and   strongly support a woman’s right to choose. That having been said, there are some issues/opinions that are espoused by many liberals, especially those on the extreme left of the political spectrum. In no particular order, here are my top peeves: Anti-vaccination movement Free universal college tuition The notion that the military and intelligence communities are inherently “evil” and that the U.S. should  never, ever  resort to military force The 9–11 conspiracy theory that claims the attacks on Manhattan and Washington were carried out by the CIA and the U.S. military The idoli...