Many months ago, HBO announced it was planning to make a movie based on the book, “Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. After reading John Nolte’s article, which indicated that the movie would be focused primarily around Governor Palin, and it wouldn’t be portraying her in a very positive light, I decided to study up on it. I purchased a copy of the book, read the TWO chapters based on Gov. Palin, and took down some notes.

As Nicole recently noted, HBO decided to release a trailer to that movie late last year. The actual movie doesn’t air until March 10, or as John Nolte wrote in his follow-up piece:

The one dynamic HBO probably didn’t count on was Palin’s decision not to run for the 2012 nomination. The film’s promotion and the cable news chatter that’s sure to follow seems timed to hit on, before, and around March 6, which is Super Tuesday.

The one line from the notes I took back in March that stood out as I was reviewing them for this piece, was:

Even though this book is supposed to be a story about 2008, it’s really all about 2012.

This movie was orchestrated from start to finish as a way to damage Gov. Palin during an election year by people who are not merely “artists & entertainers.” Just look at the people involved in the making of the movie.

First you have the director, Jay Roach who donated $2,300 to Barack Obama in 2008. Danny Strong, the person who wrote the screenplay, gave Obama $2,500 in 2008. Julianne Moore, the woman who does a poor impression of the governor, only gave $250 to Obama in ’08 but shelled out $2,500 to the DNC in 2010. And then there’s the film’s producer, Tom Hanks, who has one of the most nauseating donation lists I have ever seen, including giving a staggering sum of $345,000 to Obama. It’s safe to say that these people only donate large sums of money to causes they believe in. By looking at their donations, it’s easy to see what it is that they believe in.

Danny “Obama Victory Fund” Strong, based his HBO screenplay on a book that came under significant scrutiny after it was published, even by MSM types. The thing that stood out amongst most of its critics was the fact that Heilemann and Halperin didn’t source any of the accusations they made. They claim to have interviewed more than 300 people during their research, but not one of those people are named. Heilemann and Halperin do, however, name the people who were present during each instance during the ’08 campaign that they claim happened.

I found it interesting that within the Palin chapters of the book, Nicolle Wallace, her husband Mark Wallace, Steve Schmidt, and/or the mysterious “famous GOP strategist” are always present. It’s no secret that Nicolle Wallace has been trashing and undermining Gov. Palin since the 2008 race. Most recently, she was caught in a lie by a former senior adviser to the McCain campaign, Charlie Black. From National Review Online:

Over at the Washington Examiner, Byron York reports that Wallace is claiming, in a new Time interview, that McCain’s team considered bumping Palin from the veep slot. “There certainly were discussions — not for long because of the arc the campaign took — but certainly there were discussions about whether, if McCain were to win, it would be appropriate for her to be sworn in,” Wallace tells the magazine.

“Look, I was with McCain 90 percent of the time. If I wasn’t around, I knew what was happening. And nothing like this happened.” Wallace, he says, “is one of the few dissidents,” one of the “disaffected” staffers who continues to criticize Palin, and “she is inaccurate in doing so.”

[Charlie] Black says that’s nonsense. “Nicolle, like any author, is trying to sell books. This comment to Time, like her book [It’s Classified], is a piece of fiction. There were never any such discussions. At no high level of the campaign was there ever such talk. She’s probably doing this to sell her book.

Steve Schmidt also has a long history of trashing Governor Palin. In a 2010 post, Dan Riehl pegged the source of Schmidt’s animosity (emphasis):

The only modest bit of news in all this is that the pathetic Steve Schmidt continues to lack the class and intelligence required to simply shut up. Look at the basic facts even Schmidt is forced to confess. He would make it seem as though Palin was the absolutely worst thing about the McCain campaign, then he turns around and admits that, without her, things would have been much worse. That makes no sense.

On top of that, the fools running the campaign, including Schmidt, continued to consider Sen. Joe Lieberman for VP up until the very last minute, absolutely without realizing what a disaster that would have been. It took reactions outside the campaign to finally give them a clue how foolish they were in formulating and managing the campaign. Now suddenly, Schmidt is the all wise and wonderful know it all with the reputation, intellect and credibility to dump on Palin yet once, again? That makes no sense, either.

In continuing to not take responsibility for what a colossal failure he, as much, if not more than anyone else, was – all Schmidt has managed to accomplish with all his blathering is to put every potential national Republican candidate on notice that hiring Schmidt for perhaps anything other than coffee and sandwich fetching would be an unmitigated disaster dooming them and their campaign to eternal hell across the Republican base.

It’s clear that McCain’s campaign failed on many levels. But former staffers who were responsible for that failure used the leftist media to shift blame from themselves on to Gov. Palin, and that is reprehensible. Both the left and these former staffers had a motive to run this trash against the governor. They simply made up anything they thought sounded really bad then leaked it to an eager, Obama-rooting media which was more than happy to take their word for it. So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Wallaces and Schmidt are consistently present during Heilemann and Halperin’s tales. But what does that say about Heilemann and Halperin as journalists?

Can you really be a “respected journalist” if you never cite your sources? Sources are used so that readers can judge for themselves the credibility of each claim. Without them, “journalists” are doing nothing but repeating rumors, which usually earns one the title, “Gossip Columnist.” What about bloggers? Personally, I try not to write on important topics without listing my sources and posting links to back up claims. It’s one reason that I’ve never written a piece about all of the rumors regarding Mark Halperin sexually harassing and making inappropriate comments to female professional acquaintances. After all, they’re just rumors, right? (note: I have actually heard these rumors before, I didn’t just make them up for effect)

For years now, I’ve held to the notion that Gov. Palin’s foes will do whatever it takes to destroy perceptions of her in the eyes of Americans. From ex-staffers with an axe to grind, to smear merchants like Heilemann and Halperin, to the left-wing activists who “produce” all things Hollywood, this book and the movie that followed shows how folks with an agenda can work in concert to achieve their ends.

While each player may have a different overall agenda, the goal is the same. In the United States, 28.2 million households subscribe to HBO. That’s a lot of people who, by and large, are not familiar with the antics of the Wallaces, Schmidt, the rumors about Halperin, or how devoted Hanks is to pushing liberalism with campaign contributions and through the use popular culture. A fact not unnoticed by those responsible for this production.

There is no argument that Gellman’s book casts a very dark and negative shadow over Republican Vice President, Dick Cheney.  His own website describes the book as taking on “the full scope of Cheney’s work and its consequences, including his hidden role in the Bush administration’s most fateful choices in war: shifting focus from al Qaeda to Iraq, unleashing the National Security Agency to spy at home, and promoting ‘cruel and inhuman’ methods of interrogation.”  If you didn’t know any better, you might think that description fits a member of the KGB, or even the Gestapo.

The Dark Side, not to be confused with the UK horror film publication or as the general concept of evil in the Star Wars universe or the anthology horror TV series produced by George A. Romero or the DC comics super-villain, no The Dark Side is a documentary produced by David Fanning and Michael Kirk of Frontline.  The title of the documentary perverts a quote from Cheney a few days after the 9/11 attacks in which he stated that in order to defend America against future Osama bin Laden and al Queda attacks, we would have to work “sort of the dark side, if you will,” because, “That’s the world these folks operate in…” and depicts the struggle between the CIA and the vice president and how Cheney was the chief architect of the war on terror and invasion of Iraq.

HBO optioned the book for the mini-series, which should air just before the 2012 election.  Naturally, David Fanning and Michael Kirk of Frontline are slated as Executive Producers.  Also, listed as Executive Producers are Jeffrey Levine and David Kennedy of Fair Catch Productions, a company the California Secretary of State currently shows as “suspended.”  Who are the rest of the players?

Eric Kessler (Co-President of HBO) – Gave $2,300 to Obama for America

Richard Plepler (Co-President of HBO) – Contributed over $15,000 to Democrats in 2008, including $2,300 to Obama for America and another $500 to Obama for America

Sue Naegle (President of HBO Entertainment) – Gave $2,500 to Al Franken for Senate and $1,150 to Friends of Rahm Emanuel, who would later be Obama Chief of Staff

Len Amato (President of HBO Films) – Gave $500 to Obama for America in 2008

Paula Weinstein  (Executive Producer) –  Donated over $20,000 to Democrat candidates and organizations including John Edwards, Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama, MoveOn.org and the DNC in just the last three years.

Barton Gellman  (Writer) – $500 to Democrat Bruce Babbitt in 1987; Writer of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

Rick Cleveland  (Screenwriter) – $500 to Howard Dean in 2003 and $1,000 to John Kerry in 2004; worked with Aaron Sorkin, an ardent Democrat who has donated nearly a quarter million dollars in a little over a decade to Democrats and their committees.

This is not much different from HBO’s team on Game Change, where there was not one Republican among the whole bunch.  How can they possibly be trusted to make an unbiased political film that is set to air right before the 2012 election?  Quite simply, they can’t.

Frankly, HBO is quickly becoming the MSNBC of premium television.   What’s next from the network that brings you Bill Maher?  I wouldn’t be surprised if in two more weeks they greenlit John Wilkes Booth: An American Hero.

In the meantime, I suggest you cancel your subscription to HBO.

In the meantime….

President Bush’s 8 years in office was like someone taking a stick to a hornets nest that nobody knew still existed. He whacked it good and then paid the price with poisonous stings all over everything he tried to do. But the rest of us out there saw how the press and mainstream media reacted to him and that is how we came to clearly see what we’re really up against in the battle for America’s future.

W. exposed the soft march of a bloodless communist revolution in America by simply being, well, your typical decent, hard working, plain spoken, self-reliant American. He didn’t fit the mold of the modern American man that had been carefully cultivated through the dull 90’s and his actions were all meant to expose the true intentions of the left and boy did his administration succeed!

The side that makes the most noise usually has the most to hide — and my ears are still ringing from the onslaught of loud misinformation that came from the left to achieve political power in America once again. Ronald Reagan may be the first actor to have become President but Barack Obama is the first President who is in fact just an actor.

I was raised by my Mother and Stepfather, both proud JFK Democrats. Much to my surprise my stubborn stepfather begrudgingly voted for a Republican for the first time in his life when he voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin. (He’s 77, a Marine who fought in the Korean War. My Mother has voted for both Republicans and Democrats) Voters like him can be found hanging around American Legions and VFW’s all across America talking about the current state of affairs and many of them know something has gone terribly wrong with their party. But because of the very situation that President Kennedy warned about and Bush brilliantly exposed, these voters were silenced by a press with an agenda that wasn’t truthful and whose main goal was to captivate an entire generation of young idealistic voters and then impress upon them a role model that was carefully crafted to fit a certain marketing demographic. 

Many of our arguments against a President Obama didn’t stick for obvious reasons. First time voters would hardly care that President Obama has never run anything before because it’s likely that they haven’t either. And having such a high opinion of one’s abilities regardless of experience is what being young is all about. “Fake it until you make it” is an awful and damaging approach but widely accepted as the way in on the left and the young that are drawn to the left all know this and put it to practice without ever graduating to real skill and craft. They lay blame on everything but themselves for the sad state of American capitalism but never stop to consider that making an effort to be a good and decent person is a big part of what makes capitalism really work.

Another way to know we’re dealing with communists again is their multi-pronged attack on the very institutions that keep people directed towards attempting good and decent behavior in the first place without the need for government intervention; your local church. 

We must unite the senior citizen vote to the young conservatives and create a silent super majority that will be unstoppable in 2010 and 2012. Imagine the parents and the children of the baby boomers all shunning the childish behavior of these spoiled brat adults who have wholeheartedly embraced what is bad about human nature and refuse to even try for what is good based on the grounds that it’s all relative. I’d like to see the baton of decency handed down from the grandparents to the grandchildren, totally bypassing the selfish parents in the middle. 

So since the Democrats brazenly hijacked the image of Lincoln as the climax in their Distort American History Tour, let’s resurrect JFK as one of our own and remind them that even though he was assassinated it didn’t mean it was OK to ignore his leadership and his call to self sacrifice and his dream for “Man to be what he was born to be — Free and independent”