There goes the last lingering threat of my ever watching the new Battlestar Galactica

As mentioned in the past, I have yet to get into the new, improved (?) Battlestar Galactica, athough many sources and people I trust are fans. The reason I'm not is partly because every time I've tried an episode, the dialogue seems ennobled by the word "functional." And the whole thing has an air of such self-importance, like: This is serious science fiction.

Ooh!

But more importantly, and really, I can't stress this enough: Those are not Cylons. Cylons have one glowing eye bouncing back and forth on the middle of their forehead like a ping-pong ball. That's right, I'm old school, goddamnit.

But still, as I say, enough people I respect enjoy the show that I was prepared to say that just because I don't, it didn't mean there was anything wrong with it.

That was before I learned that it had been absolutely embraced by righties like Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz. A writer for American Prospect, Brad Reed, documents a number of examples of those on the right taking ficticious circumstances as justification for the real moves our government makes.

Everything from Star Wars to Star Trek to The Lord of the Rings is seen as reinforcement that what they think is absolutely correct which seems to me, at best, an interesting interpretation.

Of course, Roddenberry and Tolkien are dead so we can't ask them, but Tolkein is known to have disliked too much interpretation of his work. Roddenberry at least mouthed peace-and-love platitudes. And much as I may criticize most of Lucas' recent work as insults to the intelligence, I think Lucas might have a slightly different point of view of the lessons of Star Wars than

Jonathan Last, the Weekly Standard editor whose review of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was a love letter to imperialism. “The deep lesson of Stars Wars is that empire is good,” wrote Last, who justified his Empireophelia by arguing that the old Galactic Republic had become “simply too big to be governable,” and that the galaxy needed an empire to fill the void. Last acknowledged that the Empire was “sometimes brutal” but that acts of planeocide weren’t so bad “when viewed in context.” Last also showered praise upon Emperor Palpatine, whom he dubbed “an esoteric Straussian” and “a dictator ... but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet.”

A relatively benign one like Pinochet. I'll just wait here if any of you need to Google that name. Now, back to our story.

Strangely, Reed doesn't mention 24, which of course, is considered by its co-creator to be a rationalization for torture. So Republicans can enjoy it without fear, knowing that what they're getting out of it is exactly what they're intended to get out of it.

Unlike Battlestar Galactica, which they loved...

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who writes regularly about Galactica’s politics on NRO’s group blog, The Corner, also picked up on parallels between the show and the war on terror. Goldberg took particular glee in attacking Galactica’s anti-war movement, which he said consisted of “radical peaceniks” and “peace-terrorists” who “are clearly a collection of whack jobs, fifth columnists and idiots.” Goldberg also praised several characters for trying to rig a presidential election. “I liked that the good guys wanted to steal the election and, it turns out, they were right to want to,” wrote Goldberg.

...until (I am informed) events in the current season stopped looking like George Bush's war as they desperately want it to be, and more like it factually is.

“The whole suicide bombing thing … made comparisons to Iraq incredibly ham-fisted,” wrote a frustrated Goldberg, who had hoped the struggle against the Cylons would look more like Le Resistance than the Iraqi insurgency. “The French resistance vibe … is part of what makes the Iraq comparison so offensive. It’s a one-step remove from comparing the Iraqi insurgency to the (romanticized) French resistance.”

Fellow Corner writer John Podheretz shared Goldberg’s assessment, and chided conservative fans of the show who were still in denial about its sudden leftward drift. “Message to BSG fans on the Right,” wrote Podheretz sternly. “You cannot … come up with some cockamamie explanation whereby it’s not about how we Americans are the Cylons and the humans are the ‘insurgents’ fighting an ‘imperialist’ power.”

Goldberg is a poster child for the armchair warriors, those who are very gung-ho about coming up with reasons why other people should fight., and as Reed concludes,

Of course, it’s easy to talk tough about invading multiple nations if you’re not the one doing any of the work. The thrill the Galacticons get from watching the Iraq war on their TVs is the same thrill the typical Mountain Dew-swilling reject feels watching Battlestar Galactica; it’s only fun for them because they’re not going through it themselves.

Podhoretz, I learned back when he was calling Aaron Sorkin names, is incapable of imagining any piece of drama as without a political agenda. Do the writers of Battlestar Galactica have one? I dunno.

But, I do note with interest that (assuming what's been written here about the series is correct), they seem to be mirroring public opinion about Iraq-the more people think it's a mistake, the more the Cylons take the Americans role in this "allegory."

That's right, they're out on the edge of public opinion, taking their cues from the polls.

They must be Democrats.