Demagogue

This recent Mel Gibson-related post by Matthew Yglesias is a few days old, but it continues to generate fresh comments from readers. Excerpts of his original post:

I went to see The Passion of the Christ when it came out, and it seemed pretty anti-semitic to me. It also seems to me that evaluating the film based, in part, on anti-semitic things Mel Gibson said long after its release is a fallacy.

I'm just old-school like this, but it seems to me that the work is the work and the author is the author and the one thing has very little to do with the other -- if we discovered tomorrow that The Birth of a Nation was actually directed by a talented African-American looking to make some cash by making a film that D.W. Griffith could put his name on that wouldn't alter the fact that it's a racist movie.

Agreed.