Proof that once again, reality has a 'liberal bias,' because Clint Eastwood has made a movie that unflinchingly looks at our treatment of war heroes, he is getting slammed by right wing pundits.

The Australian :

More than 50 years after he first appeared in Hollywood as a bright young Republican, Clint Eastwood has been attacked by his old allies as a bleeding heart liberal for his latest film, Flags of Our Fathers.

The $US75 million ($100 million) film, which opened in 1800 cinemas in the US at the weekend, focuses not only on the World War II battle of Iwo Jima but also on the fate of a Native American soldier who, Eastwood suggests, was maltreated by the military after the war.

While most American critics have praised the film, calling it the best war film since Saving Private Ryan, others have protested against a supposedly liberal bias in the script.

Scott Holleran, writing for Box Office Mojo, said: "Flags unfolds as though it discovers something awful about the United States, making the middle classes look idiotic and racist and suggesting the nation that defeated Japan did so purely by accident."

William Bemister, a radio commentator, said he felt that Eastwood, formerly a close ally of former president Ronald Reagan, had turned in recent years from "the Man with No Name to the Man with the Bleeding Heart".

He said he could not wait for Flags's forthcoming companion film, Letters from Iwo Jima, which shows the battle from the Japanese point of view, which he is sure "will be stuffed with US atrocities, even those that extreme left-wing historians have failed to unearth".

Eastwood describes himself as a "libertarian of no party". Read on...