Spielberg's Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln was my movie selection last night. The screenplay is written by Tony Kushner based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Kushner tells the story of the passage, by a lame duck Congress in January of 1865, of a Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery. And he does it impeccably. Don't believe any of the blather you might hear about the film being too long; it is not. It clocks in at approximately the same time as Zero Dark Thirty, two-and-a-half hours, and it moves along just as briskly (if not more so).

The opening scene has Lincoln, played by the Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis, meeting troops, both black and white, getting ready to march to battle. It's an incredible scene, understated but tense; I even started to tear up. So right away I knew Spielberg, Kushner and Lewis were going to deliver the goods. And they do -- throughout the entire film.

That Argo won Best Picture and not Lincoln speaks poorly of the voting membership of the Academy. On the one hand you have a historical sideshow from the dawn of the age of neoliberalism and neoconservatism theatrically inflated to make us feel warm and fuzzy about the CIA and imperial America; on the other, you have a taut politico-historical drama that shines a light on an amazing moment, a moment that has run through our politics forever after -- the outlawing of slavery. (It's hard not to think of today's GOP House majority when watching Lincoln; then it was the Copperhead Democrats, led by Congressmen Fernando Wood and George H. Pendleton, standing in the path of change. The problem today is that we have no Lincoln in the White House or Thaddeus Stevens in Congress.)

Even if you're not a student of American political historical, Lincoln deserves a screening for the performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and the writing of Tony Kushner.

Elections are Supposed to Matter

I can't remember the last time I watched "Meet the Press."  And now I know why.  It's awful.

David Gregory, the moderator of the show, I used to think was a cut above the kind of corporate beltway reporter we've grown accustomed to the last several decades -- glib, superficial, completely lacking compassion for or understanding of people who have no bargaining power at work, whose job keeps him or her from homelessness and whose paycheck keeps shrinking. But I see no difference between David Gregory and any other facile shit bird who provides political opinions for the television networks.  His interview of Obama, who was competent and singularly unfiery, was peppered with petulant insinuations that the fiscal cliff impasse was somehow the fault of the White House. Why? Because in the end -- this is what I gleaned from watching the round table discussion following the interview -- it's all about results.  And if there are no results then the president cannot avoid responsibility because the president is afterall the president. This is what qualifies as expert analysis on the world's longest running television show. The round table consensus, kicked off by David Brooks, is that Obama is to blame, really, because he has not gone out of his way to engage all Republican points of view. This is known as false equivalence.  The corporate media treats both parties as equally culpable. Finally Doris Kearns Goodwin chimed in that Obama tried the "inside game" before and it didn't work; that's why he's going over the heads of congressional leadership now.

The point is that we're a democracy.  (We must try to believe this.) In democracies elections are supposed to matter. Obama won a historic election.The GOP lost -- Romney lost the presidential election; the Senate stayed Democrat despite ample predictions of a change in the majority; and while the GOP maintained control of the House, it lost seats there too.  Republicans refuse to acknowledge this, and this denial is sending us over the cliff.  In a democracy elections must matter.

At least Obama did a solid job explaining where we're at with two days left of the year. Either the Senate will cobble together a deal by this afternoon that both parties can agree on or Harry Reid will bring to a vote tomorrow a continuation of the Bush tax cuts for those who earn under $250,000 a year. Republicans must decide if their gerrymandering can keep them safe from voter wrath.