Posted on 02/24/2012 4:01:50 AM PST by Kaslin
Sarah Palin's top aides held a conference call to denounce the forthcoming HBO movie "Game Change," which like any ultraliberal media production, knocks Palin as a mentally imbalanced moron. Reporters are already underlining the Palin aides haven't seen the movie.
But isn't that the point? As Pat Buchanan once said about another subject, "Does one need to lift the manhole cover to know what's below?" Did the Clinton team wait to see the movie before begging ABC to kill "Race to 9/11"? Did the Kennedy team wait to see the miniseries "The Kennedys" before getting it demoted to the Reelz channel? The Palin folks can be pretty certain -- especially since the trailer itself announces it's a hit job.
Just see the rave review of Baltimore TV critic David Zurawik, who has seen this transparent propaganda, and the game is over.
"In a rational world, this film will help guarantee that Sarah Palin will never be elected to any major office again," he asserts triumphantly. Zurawik lines up just a few snippets of the Palin-bashing he relished.
1. McCain strategist (and Palin-bashing media darling) Steve Schmidt (played by Woody Harrelson) offers this analysis of the McCain-Palin ticket: "This wasn't a campaign. It was a bad reality show."
2. More than one adviser raises the possibility of Palin being mentally ill. And some of the actions and words attributed to her in the film lend credence to that smear. Zurawik adds, "I can't wait to hear the self-serving howls on Fox News when they see how Roger Ailes' million-dollar analyst mistake is depicted in the film."
3. Standing onstage on election night when it's all over, McCain says privately to Palin: "You are one of the leaders of the party now. Don't let yourself get co-opted by Limbaugh and the other extremists. They'll destroy the party if you let them."
4. Zurawik loved "how deftly the film uses documentary evidence to show Palin's incredible ignorance of foreign and even national affairs. Yes, the Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson interviews are front and center -- and amplified. And Palin looks even more uninformed, dazed, confused and silly because the filmmakers share the point of view of senior McCain advisers, such as Schmidt, who literally moan in agony as Palin infamously starts talking about the geography of Alaska and Russia."
The filmmakers use real footage of Couric and then cut in Julianne Moore's fake Palin. Other reviews note that Steve Schmidt's actual Palin-trashing, "Game Change" book-promoting interview on "60 Minutes" is the exclamation point at the end of the film. HBO is merging their leftist "docudrama" with real liberal-bias "news" clips to leave one unmissable point: Never vote for Sarah Palin. Ever. For anything.
The last HBO docudrama from this team of director Jay Roach and screenwriter Danny Strong was "Recount," which made heroes out of Al Gore's aides and lawyers in 2000 as they tried to change the Florida election results. One reviewer summed it up as "a screechy example of liberal Hollywood condescension," and "the film's flair for exaggeration is as flabbergasting as it is embarrassing."
It should be safe to assume that HBO launched this hatchet job into production with the notion that Palin was going to run for president. (She's still hinting that she'd love to be picked if the GOP has a brokered convention.) This whole enterprise reeks like a super PAC ad, complete with a pile of Obama-supporting actors and an Obama-bundler as executive producer--Tom Hanks.
The film is called "Game Change," after the book with the same title. But in the actual book, when does Sarah Palin really appear? In Chapter 20, titled "Sarahcuda," on page 353. When the book came out in early 2010, the hottest backstage tidbits were about Obama. Harry Reid praised Barack Obama's political appeal as a "light-skinned" black man with "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Ted Kennedy was furious at Bill Clinton after Clinton sneered that Obama was so inexperienced that "a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee." But HBO had no interest in hiring actors to smear Obama or Reid or Clinton. How about the relationship of John and Elizabeth Edwards, which is clearly ripe for cinematic exploration/exploitation? HBO ignored how Edwards staffers told the authors that Mrs. Edwards made them feel like "battered spouses." In brief, the authors wrote: "What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy woman."
But HBO wants to paint the Democrats as the valiant heroes and paint the Republicans as the paranoid crazy women. Nobody needs to wait until March to wonder whether HBO is ridiculous when it puts out a statement calling this movie "a balanced portrayal of the McCain/Palin campaign."
No Democrat measures up to Sarah Palin.
Including John McCain.
Anyone who thinks this is anything but a hit piece is a friggin idiot.
I loved the movie Crazy, Stupid Love with Julianne Moore. Not any more.
Somehow we have to find a way to take away Hollywood's power.
I’m dropping HBO!
"What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy woman."
Let's make a movie about this part of the book. Who would play pretty boy John Edwards?
Boy George?
Yeah, I’ve been considering HBO out of my lineup too. I only have it for the series, and Boardwalk Empire is the only recent series I watched.
Being that I’m unemployed now 4 months, and belt tightening is getting more important, I’ll make the call today, esp. in light of this bit of news.
We haven’t had HBO since 1973 when we lived in KS and my husband was stationed at Fort Riley. We moved there in 1972. I noticed that the movies and the shows kept repeating and I saw no reason to keep it. We haven’t had it since then
I don’t think he’s got the hair for it :)
Only a small percentage of the public will see this movie but those goofs will watch it over and over again. Liberals got excited before the 2004 election when Michael Moore's faux documentary was a box office success. The problem was the same herd of airheads—many of them apparently nonvoters—was coming back to the theaters night after night.
Ditto.
Somehow we have to find a way to take away Hollywood’s power.
Quit going to their movies.
The filmmakers use real footage of Couric and then cut in Julianne Moore's fake Palin. Other reviews note that Steve Schmidt's actual Palin-trashing, "Game Change" book-promoting interview on "60 Minutes" is the exclamation point at the end of the film. HBO is merging their leftist "docudrama" with real liberal-bias "news" clips to leave one unmissable point: Never vote for Sarah Palin. Ever. For anything.
HBO wants to paint the Democrats as the valiant heroes and paint the Republicans as the paranoid crazy women. Nobody needs to wait until March to wonder whether HBO is ridiculous when it puts out a statement calling this movie “a balanced portrayal of the McCain/Palin campaign."Asserting that Mr. Obama is a better president than Gov. Palin would be is, however incorrect by my lights, merely free speech. However, there is a line which HBO is oblivious to and has blithely crossed - a line between opinion, on the one hand, and reckless disregard of the truth with intent to cause harm to someone, on the other. One thing to say, even to dramatize, the opinion that John McCain “knew” that Palin was paying “too much” attention to Rush Limbaugh. But when they mix real footage with dramatization, and even more when they advertise their hit job as "a balanced portrayal of the McCain/Palin campaign,” IMHO they have set themselves up for a lawsuit. If Governor Palin isn’t running for political office this year, she could do a great deal of good by suing HBO and the Associated Press and its membership for their very socks.Why the Associated Press? Because HBO would rely on the hit jobs of the AP and its membership in order to claim that they had reason to believe that it was OK to make the claims that they did. And because (back in 1945) the AP was found by SCOTUS to be a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust law. The AP is the central culprit, because it provides cover for the rest of the publicity machine. The AP and its membership also subjects all our politicians to its flattery (“liberals,” “moderates,” “progressives”) and derision (“right wing,” “conservative). It was the AP and its membership which pushed through the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold “law.” And it is the AP and its membership which profits (in increased effectiveness of its flattery and derision) by it.
I dropped HBO and Comcast.....now strictly Netflix and AppleTV. My family loves it. Us Parents control now what the kids watch and are able to purchase or rent what WE want to watch....commercial free. After initial investment of $95 for apple tv...we are now saving $100 a month.
The establishmedia will play the most damaging scenes again and again to do their damage.
Pray for Amermica
That HBO did this hatchet job is no surprise. Their “honest” documentaries scream out loud how much they love Obama and leftist politicians in general. It is not possible for any person or filmmaker who identifies as a leftist to make an honest film about a conservative. They can’t even make an honest one about leftists. Honesty and integrity are not in their DNA. I’ll bet if you asked these punks who Hayek and Burke were, they’d be stumped. Possibly Tom Sowell as well. When Reagan was president, he was depicted by the even then very leftist media as the biggest numbskull on the planet. Things have not changed a bit since then.
Hmmm...MSNBC pays Chrissy Matthews $5 million a year, Fox pays Sarah $1 million a year.
Game, set, match to Fox.
Unless you watch a lot of cable sports, Netflix is your friend.
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