At
Esquire, Charlie Pierce reviews
Game Change, the movie based on the book based on the true-story nightmare of
that thing we all lived through just a few short years ago:
When John Heilemann, and the utterly inexcusable Mark Halperin, published Game Change, their gossipy account of the campaign four years ago, almost every page fairly dripped with flop sweat. Not from the authors, but from the dozens of professional political types, anonymous and not, who saw in the book a chance to rehabilitate their own reputations from the fools, thieves, and mountebanks for whom they'd worked. (And who, it should never be forgotten, they spent two years trying to foist on the rest of us as national leaders.) There was backstabbing befitting the court of a Borgia pope. There was resumé-polishing and brown-nosing that would have embarrassed the Haskell family down four generations. (The most distasteful was the unpardonable slandering of Elizabeth Edwards, something that the authors won't live down for a while, either.) Generally, you'd have to wait until the Ides of March to watch a group of people sell out their boss that badly. To barber a phrase from the great Dan Jenkins, the book was further proof, as if we needed any, that, if you put 100 political consultants in a barrel and rolled it down a hill, there'd always be a son of a bitch on top.
Now, the people at HBO, and the writer/director behind Recount, that network's superb retelling of the machinations in Florida in the aftermath of the 2000 election, have adapted one long portion of that book for a movie that debuts this Saturday, in what can fairly be called The Last Temptation of Sarah Palin. [...]
I won't be watching. Ever. I have had very close to what I imagine to be a lethal dose of Sarah Palin already, and until someone comes up with an antidote or at least better-performing earmuffs, I'm not going to risk it again. Even watching someone else pretend to be Sarah Palin is too much, too soon. It is fine when she travels around the country from inside the confines of a lead-shielded bus, stalking actual candidates and dispensing little kaleidoscopic glimmers of American history as interpreted by someone exposed to more than their fair share of diesel exhaust, but reliving the whole bit about her being one old man's heartbeat from the theoretical presidency of These United States still gives me hives.
But Charlie Pierce reviews it magnificently, thus sparing us all the trauma of watching. So there you go.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:
With the stroke of a single pen and a dramatic flourish, President Obama is expected at long last to consign George Bush's ill-conceived embryonic stem cell policy to the pseudo-scientific abyss from whence it came later today:
President Obama will sign an executive order Monday lifting limits on human embryonic stem cell research and will direct federal agencies to "restore scientific integrity" to decision-making, White House aides said Sunday. Obama's order follows years of wrangling over stem cells and scientific decision-making in the Bush administration.
Tweet of the Day:
Ouch. Mitt Romney asks Randy Owen of Alabama to sing "Sweet Home Alabama" which is by Lynyrd Skynyrd. h/t @jimacostacnn
— @BuzzFeedAndrew via TweetDeck
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