"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".
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.