Share your views on 'The Hunting of the President,' about the right-wing's obsession to get Bill Clinton. I watched it last night -- here are my thoughts.
Last night, I watched the DVD of "The Hunting of the President." This is a brilliant movie about the "vast, right-wing conspiracy" to bring down Bill Clinton. While the fact that there might be any such vast conspiracy would seem impossible in a healthy democracy, this movie lays out the facts for that and much, much more.
Did you see the movie version of "The Hunting of the President" or read the book it’s based on?
How did it make you feel?
What outraged you the most?
What surprised you the most?
Do you think America learned anything from the witch-hunt, or do you think we are doomed to repeat this over and over again?
There is so much material to cram in that the story is a bit thin in spots. However, small gaps don’t detract much from an otherwise gripping tale of obsession and woe.
The movie shows how the media is engulfed by the right-wing witch hunt. A former Newsweek reporter tells us on camera that reporters "had to hate Clinton" to advance in their jobs. If you were suspected of being a "Clinton sympathizer," you were reassigned and/or shunted out of the organization. One of the semi-comic moments is a reporter’s frustration at trying to explain to her editors that "there was no ‘there’ there."
So, who succeeded in the mainstream media in the Clinton era? Those who hated Clinton and those who could pretend that the right-wing fairy tale was fact. So now, when we wonder how any reporter with two brain cells to rub together could dismiss the prosecutor firings as non-political and non-controversial, consider this: Today’s political reporters were trained in a culture of journalism gone bad. Those who were promoted and rewarded in their career paths learned that the safe thing to do was regurgitate Republican talking points, ignore right-wing misdeeds and never give a liberal an even break.
So sure, the right wing has hijacked the Republican party and the country down the road to ruin, but the fact that reporters still can't come to grips with it should not surprise us. It should only disappoint us. For example, this brings to mind Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney’s dismissal of suggestions that there is something suspicious about the Bush administration's purge of several U.S. attorneys as "a conspiracy theory."
Though Mr. Carney conceded that the fears of "liberal bloggers" that "independent-minded federal prosecutors are being forced out and replaced with administration toadies" are "not ungrounded," he mocked concerns about the firings: "It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense! Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist."
Only Mr. Carney knows what motivated his knee-jerk reaction to dismiss the firings, but it seems that the ghost of Whitewater is still with us.
The movie tries to end on a hopeful note, with people like Paul Begala hoping the American people had learned something from the ordeal. But have we? As Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly and others have pointed out, the real scandal in the US attorney firings is that prosecutors who weren’t fired apparently yielded to White House pressure to target Democrats for political prosecution. It seems that having succeeded at corrupting journalism absolutely, the right wing is now doing the same to the judiciary. I’m not as optimistic as Begala.
I rented "The Hunting of the President" from Netflix, but you can find it on Amazon here: http://tinyurl.com/..., I highly recommend it.