It was a classic confrontation last night on Tucker Carlson's show, as a Hollywood heavyweight faced tough questioning on the consistency of his views.

Rob Reiner is a member of the hereditary Hollywood elite[i], cursed forever by a vivid role that defined him as an actor.

Reiner had the smarts and connections to leave acting as principal activity and focus on writing, directing, and producing.  He created some classics, including The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, and This is Spinal Tap.  He founded Castle Rock Entertainment.  This is no dummy, despite his politics.

As Donald Trump did, Reiner inherited some advantages in a line of business from his father and expanded on that base with great overall success.  But Trump has his Atlantic City casino debacle, and Reiner has North, because we all make mistakes now and then.

Reiner's genuine adult persona has the politics you'd expect the dogmatic leftist graduate student he played as Archie Bunker's son-in-law, "Meathead" Mike Stivic, to embrace in his old age if he had been successful in Hollywood.  They're the same emotion-driven, poorly thought out leftist platitudes that are never challenged when uttered by a bigshot.

That's why it was such a treat to see Rob Reiner have the guts to face Tucker Carlson, whose affable grin precedes some hard questions that had Reiner a bit taken aback.  Because, I suspect, he hadn't really thought them through.

Reiner has seized on the Blame Russia fantasy and is pushing it, via The Committee To Investigate Russia.

You can watch the entire exchange below.

A couple of high points if you are in a hurry.

• 2:43 begins a discussion on propaganda, and Reiner astonishingly intones, "Propaganda has been around forever, I mean, from Leni Riefenstahler [sic] on[.]"  Well, at least he knows about one ultra-famous propagandist – one filmmakers all study.  This tells us that even though he is intelligent, his broad knowledge base is not very impressive.  But that's not a problem that is ever brought to his attention.
• 3:47 Tucker brings up that Reiner is aligning himself with hawks like Max Boot, who wanted wars Reiner opposed.
• 6:05 Tucker brings up China as a more serious threat than Russia and calls out Hollywood for cowering and censoring films at the Chinese behest.

I actually like Rob Reiner, but I wish he would wise up.  He would benefit by having honest political discussions in private with conservative people unafraid of him.  But there is no social upside to him in doing this, as it would make the rest of his social circle uncomfortable should he start questioning the dogma all agree is critical now that Adolf Trump is president.

I'd settle for him coming back to Tucker's show.