One reason I enjoy reading Jonah Goldberg is that he often finds a different way of looking at something that everyone is talking about. Today, in his LA Times column, he ponders how the attitude to torture that most liberal Hollywood activists are displaying when it concerns actual terrorists is quite different from what they portray in movies and in TV shows all the time. And, as Goldberg points out, of course these are only movies or TV but they do reflect the culture and Hollywood wouldn't portray their heroes this way unless they admired that behavior.

In other words, it doesn't matter what the person you are coercing did or why you are coercing them in the first place. Torturing an evil man to save innocent lives is no less a sin than torturing a noble man in order to snuff out innocent lives, or just for the fun of it. The way Sullivan and those who agree with him see it, torture is torture is torture — and torture is always wrong, even when defined as intimidation and "smacky-face." "Not in my name" is their rallying cry, often with the sort of self-righteousness that suggests that those who disagree must admire cruelty.

And that's where Hollywood comes in. Politically, the entertainment community is fairly two-dimensional in its liberalism. But artistically — and to its credit — Hollywood seems to grasp that life can be morally complicated. After all, tactics that qualify as torture for the "anti" crowd show up in film and television every day. On "NYPD Blue," Andy Sipowicz, played by Dennis Franz, smacked around criminals all the time. In "Guarding Tess," Nicholas Cage shot the toe off a man who wouldn't tell him what he wanted to know — and told him he'd keep shooting piggies until he heard what he wanted.

In "Patriot Games," Harrison Ford shot a man in the kneecap to get the information he needed in a timely manner. In "Rules of Engagement," Samuel L. Jackson shot a POW in the head to get another man to talk.

And the audience is expected to cheer, or at least sympathize with, all of it. Now, I know many will say, "It's only a movie" or "It's only a TV show." But that will not do. Hollywood plays a role in shaping culture, but it also reflects it. It both affirms and reflects our basic moral sense (which is one reason why it dismays some of us from time to time).

It is hardly imaginable that Hollywood would — or could — make long-running TV shows or successful movies in which the protagonist is a soaked-to-the-bone racist. Why? Because audiences would reject the premise, and so would filmmakers. But, last I checked, there were no howls of outrage when a racist mayor in "Mississippi Burning" was brutalized and threatened with castration in order to give up information. Heck, the movie was nominated for six Oscars, including best picture.

The issue here is context. Coercion of the sort we're discussing is used by good guys and bad guys alike — in films and in real life. Just as with guns and fistfights, the morality of violence depends in large part on the motives behind it. (That's got to be one of the main reasons so many on the left oppose the war: They distrust President Bush's motives. Very few of Bush's critics are true pacifists.)

American audiences — another word for the American public — understand this. A recent poll by AP-Ipsos showed that about 61% of Americans believed torture can be justified in some cases. Interestingly, roughly half of the residents of that self-described "moral superpower" Canada agreed, as did a majority of French citizens and a huge majority of South Koreans.

My guess is that when presented in cinematic form, even larger numbers of people recognize that sometimes good people must do bad things. I'm not suggesting, of course, that the majority is always right. But it should at least suggest to those preening in their righteousness that people of goodwill can disagree.

That should start some interesting water cooler conversations.