This Christmas Day, for the first time in five years, I re-viewed "It's A Wonderful Life", and was struck by its brilliance.

As the film unfolded, I became keenly aware of many details I had not "seen" before, and thought the entire movie "came together" as if crafted by "the hand of God" - a marvel of harmony, symmetry, clarity and compassion.

Even if you have no interest in reading on, I encourage you to watch "It's A Wonderful Life" - either for the first time, or yet again.

Given that the Sicilian-born director of Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, is usually considered a "conservative", I riffled through his Wikipedia entry and discovered that he harbored almost none of the qualities considered fundamental to contemporary "conservatism".

It is true that Capra championed unregulated Capitalism, but his favored characters are consistently allied with "the little guy", and they simultaneously express disdain for "The Fat Cats". Right alongside this double whammy, we witness Capra's bone-deep communitarianism, nearly antithetical to "the Potters" of this world.

This same inscrutable discrepancy between those who consider G.K. Chesterton a conservative -- and those who see him as a liberal-radical "French revolutionary" -- is similarly baffling.

Contemporary American politics reveals that both sides of the political aisle "see" exactly what they want to see, a phenomenon consistent with humankind's fondness for "confirmation bias" - but also a circumstance that is unusually accentuated in the case of Capra and GKC.

Here are summary articles about these two men.