…Rob banks:

Today, the latest Hollywood film to glorify criminality opens. In Public Enemies, Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, and to hear Depp tell it, Dillinger was no bad guy at all, but a genuine American hero.

“The title of the film is ‘Public Enemies,’ but I don’t see John Dillinger as an enemy of the public,” Depp told the Los Angeles Times. He noted that J. Edgar Hoover was the man who sent federal agents after Dillinger, and remarked, “I mean, who’s the real criminal?”

Well, Hoover had plenty of faults, but running a gang that murdered law enforcement officers and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars wasn’t one of them. But to Depp, the bank robbing at gunpoint was a Dillinger virtue.

The sheer economic ignorance of this portrayal of Dillinger as Robin Hood is eclipsed only by the foolishness of asserting that Dillinger was heroic because, as Depp told the Times, “People at certain points just had to take up arms, did they not?”

Yes, the answer to the Depression was to rob banks. Brilliance on stilts.

And thus the saga of Hollywood stars lecturing us on topics that they know absolutely nothing about continues.