Sometimes reader mail is awesome.

Like most film-geek sites, Ain’t It Cool News is, when it comes to politics, reliably liberal. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just the water they swim in. But for some reason, this piece on the script for Kenneth Lonergan’s MARGARET, really rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it’s because the essay is by “Mr. Beaks,” a guy who’s way more sophisticated than Harry Knowles. He should know better. And maybe it’s because Beaks’ piece isn’t partisan so much as it’s offensively shallow.

Beaks begins by lamenting that we haven’t had many 9/11 movies, saying that he’s seen only five films influenced by the event. He ignores The Dark Knight. Maybe it just slipped his mind; maybe it’s because The Dark Knight asks uncomfortable questions about the stability of the liberal order when pitted against illiberal threats.

Beaks then laments our debased political culture:

Agree or disagree with that assessment, you have to at least admit that our national discourse has grown unusually hateful over the past three years, a phenomenon Lonergan captures beautifully in a series of recurring sequences set in a high school history class, which, hilariously and without fail, disintegrate into personal attacks over the Israeli/Palestinian question. Characters make broad claims, which are then broadly mischaracterized and spat back as even broader indictments of the other’s inhumanity. Tune in HARDBALL, CROSSFIRE or HANNITY AND LIBERAL GUY SO SPINELESS THE LEFT WON’T CLAIM HIM on any given night, and you’ll often see the same dubious level of debate.

Of course Crossfire has been off the air for years and Alan Colmes hasn’t been on the Hannity show in a long time either. He then says of Lonergan’s screenplay:

MARGARET is a lot of things – a coming-of-age drama, a metaphor for our country’s growing pains after having our terrorism cherry popped . . .

As if 9/11 was America’s first experience with terrorism: the Beirut Marine barracks bombings, the Iranian embassy hostages, Khobar Towers, the first World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, the African embassy bombings, Oklahoma City–this is a partial list.

These are pedantic points, I know. The larger thrust of his thesis–that the 9/11 attacks were particularly influential and that we have a hyper-polarized culture–are probably true. (It’s certainly true of our media culture.) But these superficial mistakes are just a preview of the laziness that leads to Beaks’ final Big Idea:

This brand of arguing plays perfectly to Lonergan’s unerring ear for the way we often talk past each other as we hammer home our own selfish agenda, and he does not recoil from such ugliness. Commendably, no one in the script is immune from such fiery speech; even Ramon, a compassionate, measured Latino gentleman who courts Joan, lets slip a slightly anti-Semetic slur in the frustrating heat of frenzied rhetorical combat.

Americans have never been terribly skilled when it comes to accepting each other’s differences . . .

And it’s this last bit which is just maddening. “Not terribly skilled when it comes to accepting each other’s differences” compared to who? The French? Nigerians? The Saudis? Germans? The Chinese?

Without romanticizing America, it’s impossible to find another nation even half as polyglot which has handled its cultural factions with such aplomb.

The problem with AICN’s politics isn’t that they’re often liberal. It’s that they’re infantile.

I’ve got a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the U.N.’s 2010 revision of their global population projections.

Short version: Suddenly the U.N. thinks fertility decline isn’t such a big deal and that most population contraction won’t happen. That’s because they assume the fertility trends of all nations will follow the pattern of Scandinavia.

I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say except that (1) Brian Michael Bendis is a great writer who doesn’t often rely on gimmicks. (2) In the best-case scenario, this experiment will go the way of John Stewart. I wouldn’t put more than $10 on the thing running for more than 25 issues. (3) It would not surprise me if the entire exercise–killing Spider-Man and replacing him with a PC grab-bag character in August of 2011–is a corporate effort to undercut the DC revamp that will launch in four weeks.

If DC’s pitch is to new people who aren’t comics readers, suddenly their approach won’t seem so novel. Every mainstream news story that mentions the DC relaunch and its “brave” use of minorities/alcoholics/gays/meth addicts as traditional heroes will also have to carry a mention of Marvel’s Spider-Man reboot from the month before. It makes DC look me-too-ish, rather than mold-breaking.

The final word comes from Galley Friend S.B.:

“Hey, I’ve got a great business idea: Let’s say fuck you in the biggest way possible to our dwindling core of fans. That’ll perk sales right up!”

“I know, right!? Who wants some coke?”

“I mean, screw those nerds. If it wasn’t for continuity concerns, all the cool kids would totally be into reading comics, you dig?”

The New York Post finds a fertility expert who thinks that 47 percent of women under 44 are childless. Statistics can be misleading.

Get your now, while supplies last. Each purchase comes free with a banger in the mouth.

Wait, really? That was not my understanding of the Thompson 2008 campaign dynamic:

Conservatives are nervous about whether any of the announced GOP candidates can defeat Obama, who continues to slip in the polls (the latest Gallup Poll shows his approval has fallen to 40 percent).

Are they fearful of repeating the Fred Thompson effect? Thompson, the former Tennessee senator, who was a late addition to the 2008 presidential race, never seemed to have the stomach for it, nor did his wife.

Much of the left has devolved into rationalizing (or worse) about Obama, Boehner, and the debt ceiling deal. Which is slightly odd. This is one of those debates which is much more about process than anything else. The only reason to invest it with earth-shaking importance is if you’re either (a) just starved for copy, or (b) it feeds into deeper, pre-existing concerns about Obama and/or Republicans. As a stand-alone issue, the debt ceiling debate will be forgotten in a few weeks.

All of that said, the two best liberal columns I’ve seen are from Glenn Greenwald and William Galston.

Greenwald’s piece is part of his long-running, principled critique of Obama, and it’s pretty good on its own terms. But the two bits that stood out were funny, self-aware links he posted. The first is to this cartoon:

The second is a tweet by liberal Charles Davis: “Remember when Michele Bachmann killed all those innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Libya? Ugh. Hate her.” Such self-examination will almost certainly pass as we get closer to November 2012. If it doesn’t, Obama is in even bigger trouble than he looks, because it would mean that he’s moving from Dukakis into Carter territory.

But Galston’s piece is even more damning. Here he is dropping the hammer:

As many critics have pointed out, this man-made crisis was entirely avoidable. The Democrats could have raised the ceiling last December. They chose not to, handing a sword to their adversaries. Senate majority leader Harry Reid wanted to force the incoming Republicans to accept some responsibility for the increase. We’ve seen how that worked out. And if President Obama genuinely believed that the Republicans would cooperate because it was the right and responsible thing to do, then naïveté was the least of his mistakes. (A moment of introspection about his own 2006 vote against increasing the debt ceiling should have sufficed to disabuse him of that notion.)