Unsportsmanlike Conduct

I didn't watch the HBO movie Game Change Sunday night - largely because I don't get HBO - but I've read a bit about it. To me, really, the questions surrounding its accuracy are irrelevant. How many movies have been made about losing Presidential campaigns? They lost; it's over; let's move on.

There are many movies made about the winning team, and rightly so. Supporters often make sycophantic documentaries, opponents often make vicious fantasies, but in either case they're about the winning side, not the losers.

So "Game Change" is an oddity. It's worth pointing out that, while this is an HBO film, it was made with an all-star cast: Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Woody Harrelson. Why was it made? Possibly the film-makers thought Sarah Palin would be in the midst of a Presidential run at this point and this movie would be relevant (and *cough* hurtful). Possibly they really thought the story was interesting and worth telling - although the events portrayed happened just three years ago and there are no new revelations in the film (from what I hear).

What I think motivated the filmmakers was simply schadenfreude. The election of 2008 was so cathartic that they needed to relive it in just one more way. Well, good for them.

Desperation is...

...Newt Gingrich's pride in Todd Palin's endorsement. My favorite part is where he "hopes" that Sarah's endorsement is coming soon.

Safe Zone Violation

Jay Nordlinger likes to write about "safe zone violations," a term he coined to mean unwelcome intrusions of politics into otherwise apolitical settings. A music critic and golf aficionado (as well as political opinion journalist), Nordlinger has written most often about such violations during classical music performance and sports reporting.

I had my own such encounter a week ago, when my family took my three-year-old son to see a musical production of "The Three Little Pigs" at a local theater. The production was a bit of a mashup, and somehow Little Red Riding Hood was incorporated with the pigs. All was going along swimmingly until the following exchange between Red and her mother:

Red: I'm not afraid of anything!
Mother: You're not afraid of the dark?
Red: No, I'm not afraid of anything!
Mother: Big bad wolves?
Red: No, mother, nothing!
Mother: Sarah Palin?
Red: ...well...

(If I were a nut for symbolism, I might make something of the fact that a character named "Red" is afraid of Sarah Palin. But I'm not, and I won't!)

This is just gratuitously insulting. Even in suburban New Jersey, probably a third of the adult audience is at least neutral to Palin; why risk pissing them off? Is it worth the laugh from the other two thirds? Obviously, kids' shows feel the need to insert adult humor to keep the parents engaged. But does it have to be political?

Sarah Palin Going Rogue

I won't be reading it, but then I don't read much contemporary autobiography. Lately I've read biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (and am just finishing one of Rudyard Kipling - see sidebar). The youngest of these died fifty years ago; that's about the right degree of marination to put historical figures into proper perspective. Palin's significance at that remove is likely to merit her at most a paragraph in the lives of the truly influential people of our age.

That said, I'm not a harsh critic of hers. She's a populist with solid conservative underpinnings. She primarily appeals to a different demographic than mine, but her appeal can still be a valuable part of the conservative movement.