Just watched HBO’s “Game Change”, about Sarah Palin’s exciting tenure as John McCain’s running mate. Not bad. Not great, but not terrible. I can’t even really tell the politics of the makers– one tends to assume that a Hollywood film is made by liberals. In general, Palin is made to look like an idiot, but then, Palin really is an idiot and even some conservatives will admit that.
A competing conservative biopic, “Undefeated”, has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described as “Stalinesque”.
Someone on a message board on IMDB wrote– poorly– about the idea that in order to make a good film (or tv), you have to be able to empathize with people who are different from you.
The problem for conservatives is that the minute you do that, you become a liberal
“Game Change” paints a rather flattering portrait of John McCain in one respect: McCain (Ed Harris) is depicted as running a principled, honest campaign. He is clueless about just how incompetent Sarah Palin is, but he is “ethical”. So he rejects bringing up Jeremiah Wright. He remembers being smeared by George Bush in 2000 with a scurrilous claim that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a black woman. (The photo used to “substantiate” this claim was of McCain’s adopted Asian daughter.)
That is a very, very relative statement, but yes, compared to the current Republican primaries, he was Florence Nightingale. He was also bitter after the election– in a way that Al Gore and John Kerry clearly were not– and I suspect he was somewhat delusional about just how much damage Palin did. The idea of blaming the media for denigrating the most incompetent personnel decision in modern presidential political history must have occurred to him in his sleep.
Did you know: a committee of the Texas Legislature rejected an amendment to a bill that would have required that public school sex education classes be “medically accurate”.