Jon Voight Speaks

Hugh Hewitt conducted a lengthy and interesting interview with actor Jon Voight on his show yesterday. Voight is, of course, starring in the movie "September Dawn" (which was actually made two years ago, well before Mitt Romney was on the radar screen), telling the story of the Mountain Meadows massacre, which took place about 150 years ago. One of my favorite exchanges in the interview:

JV: Boy, these questions. I don’t…here’s the deal. We know very little…generally speaking, people know very little about the Mormons. I mean, you have to really go to work to find out anything about them, so I would say of the people who go to work and they have a fair estimation, and people who have friends who are Mormons, you know, we have respect for many Mormon people in our Congress. There are about 14 people…

HH: Harry Reid.

JV: Very…yeah, and there are good guys, too.

HH: (laughing)

JV: (laughing) I don’t want to take a slap at anybody, really, here. I just…but there are very hard working servants of our country, very patriotic people. Mitt Romney’s certainly one of those.

Then again, I've really liked Voight generally since I saw him at the 2003 Oscars. We were fortunate enough to have seats down among the real movie stars (Julia Roberts, for example, was in the row behind us) and I had occasion to see Voight mingling at the reception that precedes the broadcasts. The war in Iraq had just begun; even so, the stench of leftist partisanship was in the air (that was the year Michael Moore won for "Farenheit 9/11") -- and Jon Voight, alone from what I could see, was the only actor wearing an American flag on his lapel to signal support for the United States. He seems to be a good guy.