Posted on 11/06/2008 9:05:53 AM PST by weegee
As the mighty tide swept the land on Tuesday night, I was transfixed. As the pundits pondered red states and blue states, projections and exit polls, I was swept with emotion. Not because America was "electing its first Black president." That comes a little late in the day. It was because America was electing the right President.
Our long national nightmare is ending. America will not soon again start a war based on lies and propaganda. We will not torture. We will restore the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of privacy, and habeas corpus. We will enter at last in the struggle against environmental disaster. Our ideas will once again be more powerful than our weapons. During the last eight years, the beacon on the hill flickered out. Now the torch will shine again.
We will bring our troops home, in the right way. Am I against the war? Of course. Do I support our troops? Of course. They were sent to endanger their lives by zealots with occult objectives. More than 4,000 of them have died. Even more lives have been lost by our coalition forces than by our own.
Do I blame George Bush? At the end of the day, I don't know that I really do. I agree with Oliver Stone that Bush never knew he had been misled until it was too late. I blame those who used him as their puppet. The unsmiling men standing in the shadows. On Tuesday the righteous people of America stood up and hammered them down.
Lots of people stayed up late Tuesday night. They listened McCain's gracious, eloquent concession speech. He was a good man at heart, caught up in a perfect storm of history. He had the wrong policies and the wrong campaign. At the end, let me tell you about a hunch I have. In the privacy of the voting booth, I think there is a possibility that Condoleezza Rice voted for Obama.
I stayed up late. As I watched, I remembered. In 1968 I was in the streets as a reporter, when the Battle of Grant Park ended eight years of Democratic presidents and opened an era when the Republicans would control the White House for 28 of the next 40 years. "The whole world is watching!" the demonstrators cried, as the image of Chicago was tarnished around the world. On Tuesday night, the world again had its eyes on Grant Park. I saw tens and tens of thousands of citizens with their hearts full, smiling through their tears. As at all of Obama's rallies, our races stood proudly side by side, as it should be. We are finally, finally, beginning to close that terrible chapter of American history
President Obama is not an obsessed or fearful man. He has no grandiose ideological schemes to lure us into disaster. He won because of a factor the pundits never mentioned. He was the grown-up. He has a rational mind, a steady hand, and a first-rate intelligence. But, oh, it will be hard for him. He inherits a wrong war, a disillusioned nation, and a crumbling economy. He may have to be a Depression president.
What gives me hope is that a great idealistic movement rose up to support him. Some say a million and a half volunteers. Millions more donated to his campaign. He won votes that crossed the lines of gender, age, race, ethnicity, geography and political party. He was the right man at a dangerous time. If ever a president was elected by we the people, he is that president.
America was a different place when I grew up under Truman, Eisenhower and, yes, even Nixon. On Tuesday that America remembered itself, and stood up to be counted.
This land is your land, This land is our land, From California, to the New York island. From the redwood forests, to the Gulf Stream waters-- This land was made for you and me.
*Sigh*
Two thumbs down.
Douche. Bag.
“Coalition”? I thought the mantra was “Go it alone”?
I give it “The Finger”.
no wonder this fat sh!t and I never like the same movies, he is cleary nuts
Roger Ebert needs to lay off the fatty foods.
I just had an Obama supporter say to me “Hey, how did that election go for you?”
I said, “We’ll see comrade.” He said, “Well, it’s better than 4 more years of fascism.”
This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pitiful.
Point by point:
Fairness Doctrine being redrafted to muffle talk radio.
Joe the Plumber did not get to enjoy a freedom of privacy. His records were illegally searched by the shadow government Democrats.
A "return" of habeas corpus (for enemy combatants captured in the field) at a time that President-elect Obama is calling for an end run-around the Posee Comitatus Act by establishing a national "citizen" "security" force.
You are an idiot, Ebert.
Obama is the most unworthy person to ever become president of the USA. He is nothing more than a poverty pimp race hustler, ala Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson. This country is going to rue the day they elected this guy.
Excellent.
It continues to make me chuckle how these white lib celebs use their “it’s about time a black got in there” publicity stunts to mask their own racist tendencies. In psychology, don’t they call that the defense mechanism of projection?
Nice try, Roger, but more thumbs down. You’re phony.
It’s going to be a very, very rude awakening for Roger.
WHERE WAS THE PROJECTLE VOLCANIC BARF ALERT?????
Ok, let's see how quickly the scales fall from Ebert's eyes. If they ever do for cringing lefties.
“.... and, yes, even Nixon.”
####
What no mention of McCarthyism, bible thumping, war mongering, the military-industrial complex, BigOil, corporate greed, or the hateful Christian right?
Unimaginative Leftists and their mythological dogma are so damn predictable.
Go back to fantasizing about your sphincter, Ebert...
Along with every other critic in America, he gave "W." a thumbs up. How does someone that stupid dress himself?
Gushing drama queen or blunt tool—I can’t decide which.
Both maybe.
People always tell me what a great job I have when they learn that I'm a movie critic, and I reply that, yes, it is a fun job, but unlike ordinary moviegoers, I can never walk out of a film that's sucking. But that's what Roger Ebert did, in effect, when he reviewed the indie film Tru Loved last week after watching just eight minutes of it. At least he acknowledged in the review that he was judging the film based on only the first eight minutes, but not until the end of the review.
I don't mean to be cruel here but I think that Rog will be checking out before the Obama term ends and again is rushing to judgement in his review. Hell, he called the election early in the night.
The guy sits on his ass and watches movies for a living and gets paid to act like he could have done a better job with it than Spielberg could.
He is the DUmmie’s idol because he is getting money to do what they do all day long in their mommy’s basement.
Why post Marxist propaganda here?
Enough.
There is no more "our land". There are two Americas and the gulf between the two is just getting wider.
Obama has promised “peace, land, and bread.”
I don’t read (listen to) his movie reviews either.
And the masses rose to their feet and starting singing “Kumbayah.”
Ebert is a crappy movie reviewer and an even worse pundit. And if he doesn’t lay off the cheeseburgers he will soon be as fat as Michael Moore.
Do I support our troops? Of course. They were sent to endanger their lives
Really? So we send our troops to war not to win battles but to endanger their lives?
This was just too easy. Does anyone on the Left have a functioning brain?
I see that that Rog has revise his "rules" for movie critics:
Roger's little rule book (By Roger Ebert on October 28, 2008 8:25 PM)
I had this thread after the 2004 election:
Jim Emerson: On celebrities, Politics, and movie critics (shilling for Roger Ebert) (with lengthy response from me) (Chicago Sun Times October 14, 2004 Jim Emerson, Editor of RogerEbert.com)
I used to to also dredge up links to assorted articles and headlines from the 2004 campaign as well as comments and reviews from Roger Ebert.
ESSAY: Roger Ebert: (Fahrenheit) '9/11': Just the facts? (in defense of Michael Moore documentaries)INTERVIEW: (Political) Roger Ebert interview (from the Progressive
Q: If you were putting on a progressive film festival, what movies would you show?Ebert: It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.
Rog forgot that movie about the man who was on death row trying to get his conviction overturned. At some point it is revealed to the audience that he really did commit the crime. Roger thought that this was a horrible thing because it "validated" the death penalty advocates position. He gave it ZERO stars (the lowest he can go) because he absoluted hated the politics of this film. He liked the acting. He liked the direction. He hated the message.
THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE / ZERO STARS (R)
"The Life of David Gale" tells the story of a famous opponent of capital punishment who, in what he must find an absurdly ironic development, finds himself on Death Row in Texas, charged with the murder of a woman who was also opposed to capital punishment. This is a plot, if ever there was one, to illustrate King Lear's complaint, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do.David Gale is an understandably bitter man, played by Kevin Spacey, who protests his innocence to a reporter named Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), whom he has summoned to Texas for that purpose. He claims to have been framed by right-wing supporters of capital punishment because his death would provide such poetic irony in support of the noose, the gas or the chair. Far from killing Constance Harraway (Laura Linney), he says, he had every reason not to, and he explains that to Bitsey in flashbacks that make up about half of the story.
Bitsey becomes convinced of David's innocence. She is joined in her investigation by the eager and sexy intern Zack (Gabriel Mann), and they become aware that they are being followed everywhere in a pickup truck by a gaunt-faced fellow in a cowboy hat, who is either a right-wing death-penalty supporter who really killed the dead woman, or somebody else. If he is somebody else, then he is obviously following them around with the MacGuffin, in this case a videotape suggesting disturbing aspects of the death of Constance.
The man in the cowboy hat illustrates my recently renamed Principle of the Unassigned Character, formerly known less elegantly as the Law of Economy of Character Development. This principle teaches us that the prominent character who seems to be extraneous to the action will probably hold the key to it. The cowboy lives in one of those tumble-down shacks filled with flies and peanut butter, with old calendars on the walls. The yard has more bedsprings than the house has beds.
The acting in "The Life of David Gale" is splendidly done but serves a meretricious cause. The direction is by the British director Alan Parker, who at one point had never made a movie I wholly disapproved of. Now has he ever. The secrets of the plot must remain unrevealed by me, so that you can be offended by them yourself, but let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein.
I am sure the filmmakers believe their film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters. What I do not understand is the final revelation on the videotape. Surely David Gale knows that Bitsey Bloom cannot keep it private without violating the ethics of journalism and sacrificing the biggest story of her career. So it serves no functional purpose except to give a cheap thrill to the audience slackjaws. It is shameful.
One of the things that annoys me is that the story is set in Texas and not just in any old state--a state like Arkansas, for example, where the 1996 documentary "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" convincingly explains why three innocent kids are in prison because they wore black and listened to heavy metal, while the likely killer keeps pushing himself onscreen and wildly signaling his guilt. Nor is it set in our own state of Illinois, where Death Row was run so shabbily that former Gov. George Ryan finally threw up his hands and declared the whole system rotten.
No, the movie is set in Texas, which in a good year all by itself carries out half the executions in America. Death Row in Texas is like the Roach Motel: Roach checks in, doesn't check out. When George W. Bush was Texas governor, he claimed to carefully consider each and every execution, although a study of his office calendar shows he budgeted 15 minutes per condemned man (we cannot guess how many of these minutes were devoted to pouring himself a cup of coffee before settling down to the job). Still, when you're killing someone every other week and there's an average of 400 more waiting their turn, you have to move right along.
Spacey and Parker are honorable men. Why did they go to Texas and make this silly movie? The last shot made me want to throw something at the screen--maybe Spacey and Parker.
You can make movies that support capital punishment ("The Executioner's Song") or oppose it ("Dead Man Walking") or are conflicted ("In Cold Blood"). But while Texas continues to warehouse condemned men with a system involving lawyers who are drunk, asleep or absent; confessions that are beaten out of the helpless, and juries that overwhelmingly prefer to execute black defendants instead of white ones, you can't make this movie. Not in Texas.
What a pompous ass.
regarding “This Land Is Your Land”
The Communist Woody Gutherie’s original had this lyric:
As I was walkin’ - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin’
But on the other side .... it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!
and his Communist buddy Pete Seeger sang it with this addition:
This land is your land, but it once was my land,
Until we sold you Manhattan Island.
You pushed our Nations to the reservations;
This land was stole by you from me
It was the Communist response to “God Bless America” which was Irving Berlin’s gift to this nation that had given him such opportunity.
Irving Berlin wrote it in 1918 and revised it in 1938 changing some lyrics and adding and introduction:
While the storm clouds gather far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.
A genuine cumbaya moment for the fat numbnut and a genuine Maalox moment for me.....
Where is the projectile, wall-staining, hernia-inducing barf alert?
The other one (Siskel) is dead. Or do you mean the other, other one, Dopey Roeper?
Maybe you can appeal to the admin mod for one. I do regret not including one.
Biggest bunch of BS I’ve ever heard. This will be the mantra for all the liberal leftists RATS for the next 4 years.
Just croak.
He used to be the fat one. Now he’s the one who has cancer and can longer speak.
You had to ask, didn't you?
He forgot Obama is buying us all gas and paying our mortgages. Ebert heard there are donuts too
Obama = fascism. Fascism is as much a product of the left as communism.
Roger's wife is black. I don't accuse him of racist tendencies. He also enjoyed the services of a BBW black actress/escort that director Russ Meyer introduced him to while working together on Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens. I'd recommend that people not google for pics from that film as it is "not safe for work". Russ introduced him to buxom white women too while they worked on Beyond The Valley of the Dolls.
In a commentary track for the BTVOFUV, Russ says when she came to Roger's door in response to the escort ad, he "take everything but the sh** and the pi**".
Like an old lesbian?
What was it that Roger one time said about the kind of idiots that get their "history" from biopics?
And if Bush was not the evil one, "unsmiling men standing in the shadows" (boogeyman visuals to rival "communists under your bed"), then how does the election of Obama "hammer them down"? They are still "out there".
The weird thing is the new guys on "At The Movies" are even worse. They still can't stop talking about how incredible "Recount" was and it wasn't even a theatrical movie. They didn't care, they reviewed it anyway and then gave it another drippy, wet kiss when it went to DVD.
Pretty close...
My favorite part is where he describes Obama as a “grown up”. That’s exactly what the girlfriend called Tom Hanks’ character in “Big”. The boy in a man’s body.
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