In the alternate Althouse reality, Maureen Dowd is concerned about the health and future of the Democratic Party. Therefore, the only reason she would care about the historical accuracy of Selma is because she (and other liberals) “would like to be using the 50-year anniversary of LBJ’s inauguration to celebrate LBJ as a great hero.”
The rest of Althouse’s piece is impenetrable to me, probably because I do not speak wingnut and can’t suss out the numerous delusional unstated predicates that I am supposed to accept.
To see what I mean, try figuring out what the following is supposed to mean:
The GOP got its “Lincoln” (though Spielberg deliberately withheld it from pre-election release in 2012). Where is the great movie-hero President for the Democrats? It could have been LBJ, and with “Selma,” Democrats are stuck with the opposite extreme, the would-be hero appropriated as a villain to boost the heroism of MLK.
I think she is suggesting that the liberal Steven Spielberg withheld the release of Lincoln until after the polls closed in November 2012 in order to avoid giving the Republican Party a boost. After all, if millions of voters saw a Republican president acting heroically and compassionately toward our African-American citizens, they might have concluded that Mitt Romney was going to do likewise. Right? Is that what we’re supposed to believe that Spielberg was thinking?
This next bit really challenged my reading comprehension skills.
Dowd saw “Selma” in “a theater full of black teenagers,” who’d received free tickets, “[t]hanks to donations” — from whom, Dowd never says. She expresses dismay that “a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.” So I wonder whether historical accuracy is Dowd’s real concern or whether it’s got more to do with the political interests of the Democratic Party.
And who did make those donations? If you look at who benefits, you might guess: Republicans.
She then quotes a Washington Post article that says that the free tickets to Selma were provided by “more than two dozen black business leaders.” Is Althouse suggesting that these black business leaders are Republicans? Is she being sarcastic? Would I know if I read her columns on a more regular basis? Does anyone have a wingnut decoder ring?
Here’s another question that applies equally to Down and Althouse: is the way to watch Selma to spend the entire two hours and eight minutes that the picture runs trying to figure out which political party or historical figure benefits the most from the fact that the other people in the theater are watching it?
I’ll tell you another thing. When I watch footage from the Civil Rights Era, whether real or fictionalized, I don’t see “white villains.” I see my political enemies. And they’re still here with us.
If you’re white and you find yourself feeling defensive about the white villains in Selma, there is something wrong with you already. You’re not supposed to belong to that tribe. Didn’t you learn anything in school?
I have absolutely no idea what that woman is talking about.
Does anyone?
“Down and Althouse.”
Perfect. Like a hapless comedy team who don’t know why no one laughs in the right places.
Also, exactly right, Martin, on the political point-scoring. All GOP punditing (which is all the philosophy the right has left) is about political relativity: when you have abandoned policy all you have left is imaging.
This is why xenophobia, taxophobia, ACA-phobia, and everything else is so easy for them. You can’t have contradiction when you hold no real principles.
Here’s another question that applies equally to Down and Althouse: is the way to watch Selma to spend the entire two hours and eight minutes that the picture runs trying to figure out which political party or historical figure benefits the most from the fact that the other people in the theater are watching it?
Boo, that’s how Washington pundits think about EVERYTHING.
This is why almost no one understands what ACA actually does – because instead of explaining it Washington political media has spent years and years of TV time and column inches discussing which party is likely to benefit during the next election cycle.
NOTHING is analyzed for what good it might do for people. EVERYTHING is about who wins and who loses.
The model for American political news coverage is ESPN.
Exactly. Sports. That’s why the prevalence of “both sides do it” can’t be broken. In sports it’s only sporting if both sides have a turn.
Also, if ACA were tennis lessons and not life-saving health care, the discourse of the Beltway would change not one iota.
Yes, and Dowd is their mascot. What else would the movie be about?
Heh. I was just mentioning Johnson Yes-Man Jack Valenti in yesterday’s thread. Touching little story, if true. But could be — I recall reading that even Lady Bird was disgusted by some of the political things she heard her husband discussing the night of the assassination back in the WH, so disgusted that she went to sleep in another room.
But I forgot to mention other Johnson apologists like Beschloss and the Usual MSM Historians of his ilk like Doris Kearns Goodwin. Typical of Beschloss to try to interpret Johnson’s thinking in the absolute best light possible for him, but he seems to have omitted a fact or two re 1963, namely that even after Birmingham, then-VP Johnson advised JFK (after playing hard to get on the CR issue for months) that he should still delay submitting his CR bill until his other legislative bills had passed Congress. It was more Johnson’s 1963 strategy of delay, not any notion of delay by Kennedy, that he intended to implement in 1965 for the VR bill, when Selma intervened and forced his hand.
As for some LBJ loyalist saying LBJ didn’t allow the FBI to send the King sex tape to his wife — ??? I thought it was well established that Hoover did so.
I don’t think it’s established that he got LBJ’s permission to send it though. Is there any reason to think he even asked for it?
There is evidence on the other hand that Hoover’s efforts to turn Johnson against King were failures, because Johnson’s and King’s conversations on getting the Voting Rights bill passed were taped, you know. King and Johnson were ultimately able to alienate each other without Hoover’s help, over the Vietnam War, though I believe King took care not to personally blame Johnson whenever he spoke against the war.
Johnson committed a lot of terrible sins in his political life, but I don’t see why we should think he wasn’t sincere in supporting his own legislative program. As to whatever the movie says, I don’t mind. I love the Three Musketeers like crazy, but I do not believe Anne of Austria had a love affair with the Duke of Buckingham. It’s important to emphasize the agency and the inspired character of the nonviolent civil rights movement and not to suggest that the civil rights victories were handed to them by beneficent white rulers; the movement acted and won.
Correct, and I was just responding to the statement in the cited piece that seemed to suggest Mrs King didn’t receive the tapes. She did.
Btw, have these tapes ever been released? Going on half a century now, and still (last I checked) all we have, all any historian has, including those like Taylor Branch who cited these tapes and the transcripts frequently in his 3 books, is just the FBI’s version of what is purportedly on the tapes. I’m skeptical, until they can be authenticated by a truly independent source. I don’t doubt they exist, but I do doubt some of the FBI’s representations of what is said and done on the tapes.
As to LBJ, I too don’t doubt he was sincere in supporting his legislative program — Johnson of all people was highly fearful of failure, to an extreme, and of looking bad in the eyes of history, or in comparison to JFK or FDR. Especially JFK.
To “grok” Outhouse, you need an English-Gibberish/Gibberish-English Dictionary.
Sadly, I lent mine out to someone when Sarah “The Whore of Babblin’-on” Palin hit the Presidential election scene, and never got it back!
Probably because when she became McCain’s VP choice, I started drinking heavily, and forgot who I lent it to.
“The Whore of Babblin’-on” Inspired!
“The GOP got its “Lincoln” (though Spielberg deliberately withheld it from pre-election release in 2012).”
THIS bullshit again. Good God, these wingnuts are completely delusional. Even people who don’t know much about politics know that the Republican Party is now the party that caters to racists. The GOP walked away from Lincoln’s legacy, intentionally and consciously.
Here’s another touchstone of this bullshit: Rand Paul’s appearance at Howard University. He had the unmitigated gall to condescendingly ask some of the most outstanding students in the United States if they knew that Frederick Douglass had been a Republican.
Then he did this:
We all know that Rand lied when he said no Republican wants to return to the denial of the vote to African-Americans and other minorities. In fact, we know this EXPLICITLY, not just rhetorically, because the GOP bloc on the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and Rand and his fellow Republicans have done nothing to restore the VRA.
Rand and the rest of the GOP know that catering to racists and denying the vote to minorities is their best chance to win back the Presidency while hanging on to their retrograde, 1%-serving policies.
That’s funny. The Radical Republicans depicted in Spielberg’s movie wouldn’t be welcome in today’s Democratic Party, let alone the GOP.
Truer words….
Unless you have solid evidence that members of the Democratic caucus in Congress or important White House staff read Dowd and Althouse, you need not cover their panegyrics and gyrations any more than you need cover Noonan’s St. Ronnie nostalgia.
Pointing out looney in the current political culture suffers from having to many candidates and among those the Dowd and Althouse shticks are pretty long in the tooth after well over a decade of repetition.
All you have to do is ask “Who’s ready for Hillary?” and immediately do the culling of both the pro- and anti- looneys. Same goes for George Will and Tom Friedman, who seem to be a other members of the Dowd-Althouse school of journalism.
Althouse must have written this column at Nooners’.
Althouse doesn’t speak wingnut, she speaks drunk.
By way of this:
Had daughter and her family down from the suburbs north of here where both she and her husband teach in the mostly highly regarded public school system. At dinner, the youngest, 8 year old twins, proudly recounted all that they were being taught in school ahead of MLK Day about the Montgomery boycott, the march to Selma, Rosa Parks, and MLK himself. They occasionally got an extra fact added by their 2 older sisters.
Their granddad and grandmomma were suitably impressed that they were apparently being taught the real facts. ( We actually lived through them) And, this is a very red state but it ain’t Texas for sure. But then, we’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about our native son. Tis good that they’re teaching the young ones to be proud of him and to accept the overt racism of the period for what it was.
Yes, and you saw LBJ portrayed as your enemy on race issues.
And that is a vicious and cruel lie.
The decoder ring for Althouse is that she is interested in what people aren’t saying. She likes to dig around a little and come up with what she thinks are the unstated reasons that Dowd wrote what she wrote.