Ed Asner maybe not a Stalinist

The World Net Daily columnist who suggested that actor Ed Asner had come out as a Stalinist has made a retraction. I mentioned this in an earlier post.

The columnist, Kevin McCullough has provided this transcript of the exchange:

McCullough: "If you could portray an historical biography and you had an unlimited budget, unlimited support cast and everything you could ask for, who would it be?"

Asner: "Well, you know something, they've played Hitler, nobody has ever really touched Stalin, it just occurred to me. It's not because I am a liberal or anything like that. Stalin is one big damn mystery, I wonder why nobody has tried it? Many people, you know, speak of the fact that he killed more people than Hitler - why does nobody touch him? It's strange. So, and he was about my size, my height - with a wig I probably could do it."

So, it appears from this that Asner was expressing the idea that Stalin would be a challenging character to portray. I'm a little puzzled by his comment that no one has tried it, though. There have been a number of screen portrayals of Stalin. But maybe Asner meant that no one had tried it in the way he had in mind.

Tags: ed asner, kevin mccullough

At other AOL political blogs

Progressive Musings has been looking at other liberal Web sites and playing with posting photographs. And he's doing a lot better at it than I am, I must say! I'm digitally challenged when it comes to photos. I'm going to work on it. I'm currently recovering from a Windows crash. PM is also shaking his head in amazement at Pat Robertson and Ghettopoly.

Cheese Louise is dissecting the California recall, a fertile topic.

Windmills of my mind tried to keep her mind off politics for a few days. But now she's back to musing about the Texasification of American politics. She also pointed out the other day that AOL Journalmeister John Scalzi has a non-AOL blog, Whatever, where he's been talking about spam, radio appearances, baseball and his general approach to commenting on political issues.

Charlie Eklund at The Other Shoe quotes from an article in which Ed Asner seems to be outing himself as an admirer of Joe Stalin. I think that may be reading too much into Asner's comment, in which actually says that he would like to play Stalin, and comments that he thinks Stalin is "misunderstood." The source article in a column from the conservative World Net Daily does imply that. But I'd take that with a grain of salt.

British historian Alan Bullock did a great biography called Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives that was one of the first post-Cold War histories I read. I can imagine that either of those characters would be a fascinating challenge for an actor.

Tags: aol journals, ed asner, john scalzi