Now, HBO’s main competitor Showtime is backing a new documentary on Vice President Dick Cheney. The channel hired R.J. Cutler, the producer behind the pro-Clinton documentary “The War Room,” to give us a new look at President George W. Bush’s vice president and confidante.

Tentatively titled, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” the film will take a look at one of the most powerful vice presidents in history. Here’s director R.J. Cutler’s take on the upcoming film from a Showtime press release:

Like it or not, we live in a world defined by the domestic and international vision of Dick Cheney — perhaps the single-most influential non-Presidential figure in American political history,” said Cutler. “But for all the debate that his re-emergence in the public eye has caused, the fact is that Cheney the man remains an enigma, and the  manner in which he utilized his power and experience to become such a dominating political figure, have been left largely unexplored. This documentary will shine a balanced and multi-dimensional light on this truly polarizing figure.

Will “The World According to Dick Cheney” be a fair representation of the veteran political figure?  We’ll have to wait and see, but consider this snippet from a piece Cutler wrote about how “The War Room” got such unfettered access to Clinton’s campaign.

Our final hurdle was going down to Little Rock to get James [Carville] on board. We sat with him and told him what we wanted to do, and he said, “I get it, I totally understand. But you have to understand that the only thing that matters in my life is getting Bill Clinton elected president. Anything else is a distraction. Why would I possibly want to do it?”

I thought I knew the answer to James’s question: You’ve got to do it for history; you’ve got to do it so that people can see how amazing you are; you’ve got to do it because you’re about the change the world.

No official air date has been announced, but if the film takes a decidedly anti-Cheney stance don’t be surprised if it hits small screens close to the Nov. 2012 elections.

Too Big to Fail, which premieres on HBO on May 23, 2011, features a star studded cast recounting the events that led to the financial crisis and bailouts by the U.S. government in 2008. It is a mini-series packed into a 98-minute made-for-television movie where several essential characters are quickly introduced and where finance and economics are casually discussed. It may help if one has a baseline of knowledge about the crisis before watching the movie. If one doesn’t know who Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner are or what Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and AIG are, it may prove slightly difficult to follow.

Although the Director, Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile), was limited to telling a very long and complicated story in a very short amount of time, he was able to skillfully pull it off. Perhaps this is because the screenwriter, Peter Gould (Breaking Bad), deftly adapted Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 prize winning New York Times Bestseller, Too Big to Fail.

The cast was right out of a Robert Altman film, there was a large number of well known actors including William Hurt (Paulson – Sec. Treasury), James Woods (Fuld – Lehman Bros), Paul Giamatti (Bernanke – Chair, Federal Reserve), Bill Pullman (Dimon – JPMorgan Chase), Ed Asner (Buffet – Berkshire Hathaway), Billy Crudup (Geithner – President, Federal Reserve), Matthew Modine (Thain – CIT Group), Tony Shalhoub (Mack – Morgan Stanley), Topher Grace (Wilkinson), Cynthia Nixon (Davis), and many others. They all looked and played their parts very well with the exception that there seemed to be no effort made toward sounding like the people they played. It was difficult to get past the notable voices of the actors. Paul Giamatti sounds like Paul Giamatti and nothing like Ben Bernanke. Hurt sounded nothing like Paulson. Crudup nothing like Geithner. Perfection wasn’t necessary, but it seemed as though there was little to no effort made at all by the actors to at least sound a little more like the real people they were portraying and less like themselves.

The story opens on a  shot of Ronald Reagan. It is news footage of a speech he gives on deregulation. Credits play as we see an image of Clinton signing a piece of legislation as the audio of newsmakers make mention that this is Congress’ bill being singed. Alan Greenspan is seen and states, “Don’t regulate for regulation’s sake,” which is followed by Bush proclaiming everyone should live out the American dream and own their own home. Miscellaneous clips talks of high profits and subprime loans, and then mortgage meltdown and government bailout.

At this point, I am thinking this film is going to be about blame… and that blame is going to be deregulation ushered in by Reagan, the Republican Congress during the Clinton years, Bush 43, and Reagan through Bush’s Federal Reserve appointee, Alan Greenspan.

This prompts me to check the cast and crew to see who they support and if they are bringing their agenda to this story in their hopes to rewrite history and put Republicans in a negative light and Democrats in a positive light before the election in 2012. And, of course, the Director and the Writer are both ardent Obama supporters. All those at HBO support Obama like Co-President Eric Kessler, Co-President Richard Plepler, President of HBO entertainment Sue Naegle, President of HBO Films Len Amato and Executive Producers Paula Weinstein, Carol Fenelon, and Ezra Swerdlow. Even the Cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau and Casting Director Alexa Fogel have contributed to Obama’s 2008 campaign. And the Obama supporting list of actors is long too: Topher Grace, William Hurt, Matthew Modine, Cynthia Nixon, and Amy Carlson. As if that’s not enough, there are many other ardent left-wingers like Paul Giamatti, Bill Pullman, Tony Shalhoub, and Ed Asner.

Then the story opens on James Woods playing Dick Fuld, Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers… an ardent Democrat and Obama supporter. James Woods stands out as the political maverick in the cast. In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Woods is quoted as saying, “I’ve always said that the next Obama slogan should be, ‘Barack Obama: Putting America Out of Business,’ because that’s what he’s doing.” So I decided to turn off my bias filter and give this story a chance.

As the story unfolded, I saw that the villains in this film weren’t the Republicans, rather it was a single villain… the total and complete financial collapse of our nation, or as Bernanke puts it, “[replaying] the depression of the 1930s. Only this time… far, far worse.” So, regardless of any one American’s political affiliation watching this film, total and complete financial collapse is an enemy we can all collectively desire to defeat.

The heroes, however, that’s a little more complicated. The actual heroes of the story are Republicans Henry Paulson (Secretary of the Treasury), Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve), and Independent Timothy Geithner (President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). They artfully maneuver their way through the minefield of economic collapse. Bear Stearns has already collapsed, Lehman Brothers is on the brink, Merrill Lynch next, and with all this going on, AIG – the safety net for all these creditors – was in the process of imploding from its own lack of liquidity and inability to meet its obligations. If AIG falls, all the banks fall. People would pull their money out of their banks and there would be no George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) trying to stop the “run on the bank” by convincing his depositors to take only what they need from his honeymoon stash. America, as we know it, would be in ruins.

Every maneuver in their quest to stabilize the markets is met with unpredictable reactions. Once they believe they’ve averted disaster, the pundits, investors, and citizens react differently than expected. It’s a reminder of Nobel winning economist F.A. Hayek’s precept that, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

But in the end, as we all know, it was capital injections in the form of a Troubled Asset Relied Plan (TARP) that would “save the day.” In short, the plan would see the U.S. government purchase assets and equity from all financial institutions, even if they didn’t need it, in order to stabilize and strengthen the financial sector. As Bernanke put it, the upside would be stabilizing banks faster, the downside would be nationalizing a few banks. Their plan to soften the blow was that they would force private banks to participate in this plan under law, but that the government would not have a voting interest or the ability to tell the banks how they use the money injected into their coffers… leaving the question to the viewer, “They will lend it out, won’t they?”

But, was TARP the right solution? If one believes it was, then the heroes of this story are without a doubt Republicans Paulson and Bernanke. But, if one believes it wasn’t the right solution, then the Republicans are just kicking the can down the road. Regardless, the story is a quest for a private solution, according to Paulson.

As Republican public relations guru Jim Wilkson (Topher Grace) says at one point, “You just can’t hand the banks massive piles of cash. Nobody’s going to go for it. To the Republicans, it’s nationalization. To the Democrats, it’s a bailout. And the banks are going to go ballistic.”

The story is well crafted and builds suspense out of the unexciting topics of finance and economics. There were parts that bothered me, like making the Republican Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, look like an immature boob, or Republican presidential candidate Senator McCain look like he is clueless on economic matters contrasted by Senator Obama’s grip on the subject, or simplistically blaming deregulation while omitting the fault of Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, or that derivatives and subprime loans were born during Clinton’s presidency, or more importantly that in 2006 Republicans pleaded with the Democratically-controlled Congress to begin taking measures by pulling the reigns back on Fannie and Freddie to mitigate the impending economic disaster.

Those criticisms, however, were offset by so many of the lines delivered by Topher Grace’s character, Jim Wilkson, who best resembled the attitudes and feelings of most Americans during this time. At one point, it is suggested that the government purchases up the toxic assets of the banks, to which he responds, “Ohhh, call it cash for trash,” he also calls nationalization “the N-word” and that it is un-American, and he suggests that the government running the banks would be like the government running the Post Office, which they “run like a dream.” Another character addresses the issue that the government having the ability to dictate compensation would be the biggest “brain drain this country has ever seen.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is characterized as something like the head of the Mafia. Her character comes across as an elitist snob, which I particularly enjoyed.

The movie was a surprise. Although it wasn’t 100 percent balanced, it was enough for this right-winger to actually enjoy it. And the filmmakers did a pretty decent job packing in a lot of characters and a lot of story into a short amount of time. If Obama-loving HBO can pull off the upcoming Sarah Palin story, Game Change, and the Dick Cheney movie, Angler, with the same deftness and fairness, I will be pleasantly surprised.  Better yet… I will be astonished.

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.

With a movie based on the gossipy, mostly unsourced, pro-Obama, Palin- savaging “Game Change” already casting and likely timed to boost President Barack –War of Choice! — Obama’s re-election bid in 2012, it looks as though HBO’s decided to double down with a miniseries written by a “West Wing” alum that’s based in part on the PBS (your tax dollars used against you again) Frontline documentary, “The Dark Side.”:

HBO has optioned the book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Barton Gellman for a miniseries to be executive produced by Paula Weinstein.

The mini, which will be based on the bestselling book and the Frontline documentary The Dark Side, tells the story of Richard Bruce Cheney from his early days as Donald Rumsfeld’s protégé in the Nixon administration, to the nation’s youngest Chief of Staff under President Ford, to serving as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, through two controversial terms as Vice President under President George W. Bush. According to the producers, the project will center on Cheney’s “single-minded pursuit of enhanced  power for the Presidency (that) was unprecedented in the nation’s history.”

Read the full post here.

In the meantime, don’t hold your breath for any kind of election-timed docu-drama titled, Jeremiah and Me, or Obama: The Lost College Years the Media Isn’t Interested in Investigating.

Oh yes, and I almost forgot to mention that he sees nothing uncivil about the fact that MSNBC’s Ed Schultz wishes that former Vice President Dick Cheney would die.

That’s right: When recently asked about comments Schultz made in March 2009, wherein Schultz called Cheney an “enemy of the country” and prayed that God would soon whisk him away to “the Promised Land,” Dreyfus said the words were “beautifully phrased.” (Moreover, Hollywood’s self-proclaimed crusader for civility is on record saying that when he prepared to play Cheney in the movie “W.,” he did so by searching his own heart to find “villainy in the world.”)

It’s kind of discombobulating isn’t it? First, Dreyfuss bemoans lacks of civility in political discourse so he founds the Dreyfuss Initiative to help foster civility in our discourse again. Secondly, he bemoans the diminished study of Civics, which he views as a basis for civility, thus he forges a curriculum to restore the study of Civics (and therefore promote civility). Finally, he then calls Cheney a villain and says that Schultz’s prayers for Cheney’s death were “beautifully phrased.”

In all these things, Dreyfuss perfectly demonstrates why salt-of-the-earth Americans look at Hollywood as out of touch with the real world. His personal lack of civility has undermined any efforts he might exert to better political discourse and turned his otherwise admirable endeavors into little more than a bad joke.

And for civility’s sake, let me add one more thing: God Bless Dick Cheney.

She did so initially by accusing Sarah Palin of being “a traitor to this country.” This ridiculous statement caught my attention not because it had any foundation in facts, but because it was being made by Barr: a woman who made headlines in 1990 for mocking America by grabbing her crotch and spitting while singing the National Anthem for a baseball game between the San Diego Padres and the Cincinnati Reds.

Barr next accused Palin of being “a dupe” and an opportunist who’s capitalizing on the “anti-intellectualism” of Americans. And while there’s something inherently laughable about Barr speaking derisively of “anti-intellectualism,” it’s somewhat offensive that she doesn’t guard against throwing the word “dupe” around so recklessly. After all, she is the dupe who once donned a Nazi uniform and wore it in pictures that showed her taking “burnt Jew cookies” out of an oven.

Yet as stupid as all these things were, perhaps Barr’s most stupid statement was her assertion that Dick Cheney has never “[earned] one damn thing. [The] guy’s never worked an honest day in his life.” Where has she been for the last 10 years? A period of time in which Cheney was relentlessly criticized for his ties to Big Oil, via his past working relationship with Halliburton. To this day, Cheney continues to be vilified for his work with that company.

Thus while Barr tried to paint Cheney as elitist and out of touch, the truth is Halliburton has been a convenient political noose that real elites tighten around Cheney’s neck every chance they get. By “real elites” I mean people who’ve never had to work a day in their lives because they either married wealthy women or were born into families with enormous wealth: people like Senator John Kerry or the late Ted Kennedy. (Such elites have been so successful at tying Cheney to Big Oil that even the all knowing, all seeing Robert Redford was fooled into blaming him for the April 2010 Gulf Oil Spill.)

That Cheney was (and is) one of the most hardworking, decent human beings to ever hold the office of Vice President is lost on Roseanne because she is swallowed up in a world of self-loathing and bitterness, much akin to Cher and Janeane Garofalo. And for this same reason, she can only look on Palin with contempt and spew vitriol toward her because the former Governor dares to be comfortable in her own skin.

Barr is so hate-filled and so non-intellectually stimulating that I may even owe Garofalo an apology for mentioning her in this post (and that’s saying a lot).

—–

And the characters themselves are – in the classic critique offered by a thousand screenwriting teachers – less characters than caricatures.  The first real redneck we meet is a racist loudmouth.  As is the second.  And the third is, so far at least, just a wife beater, though I expect he’ll end up hating black people too.  This is no surprise.  To people who write for the entertainment industry, if you live east of I-5 and south of the Mason-Dixon, you’ve got a sheet and a flammable cross in the back of your pick-up and you could someday grow up to be a revered Democratic senator.

Oh, and there’s not enough zombie action.  Instead of flesh-eating terror, we get scenes of budding survival suffragettes complaining about having to do the laundry.  Seriously.  The little band of refugees can’t be bothered to set up the most basic security for the undefendable position they’ve chosen to occupy, but these walking, talking clichés have plenty of time to bicker about gender roles while scrubbing Dockers.

These chronic problems with characters and actions that do not ring true, mixed with lazy writing and an inexplicable decision to spend most of the each episode on discussions of feelings, means that after this six episode season ends, the viewers might not arise when the second season stumbles across the screen next year.  What a waste.

Now, this criticism does not bring me any joy, because for as long as I remember I have had a weakness for zombie films.  The only film that ever truly freaked me out me – besides Alien (1979) – was the original Night of the Living Dead (1968).  I recall the immortal Bob Wilkins on the San Francisco Bay Area’s Channel 2’s Creature Features showing the uncut Night trailer in the mid-70’s (He later showed the entire film – unedited, because he was awesome and it was like 1:30 a.m. and no one decent was watching anyway).  That thing scared the crap out of me – I didn’t feel such unadulterated terror again until ObamaCare passed.

Night is a great film – lean, mean (in fact, it is probably the bleakest film ever made) and utterly terrifying.  Its crudeness is part of its charm, as is the fact that it was not made in shiny, fake Hollywood but in gritty, heartland Pennsylvania.  Night did not (and does not) look or feel like anything else – despite the weird ghouls stumbling about, it had an air of realism (heightened by the use of TV commentators talking about the zombie plague) that made it that much more scary.

Now, in Night, director George Romero did the same things The Walking Dead is trying to do, except he did them right.   This was probably just luck.  Let’s be clear about one thing: George Romero is a hack whose movies have gotten steadily worse over the years.  His latest films are literally unwatchable – Land of the Dead is one of the stupidest, most boring movies not starring Ashton Kutcher. Its follow-ups are, astonishingly, even worse.  But in Night, his characters usually make intelligent choices, not that it helps.  No, it’s not an Edward Albee living room character study, but the characters are at least drawn with a bit of subtlety (I like how the most obnoxious character is the one who has the best ideas for survival).  And while there is plenty of character interaction, the zombies are never absent for extended periods while the survivors rehash Gloria Steinem-esque cultural battles from about four decades earlier.

The original Dawn of the Dead (1978) followed, with Romero moving his survivors into a mall.  Again, his characters generally made good choices, like blocking the entrances and bringing lots of M16 ammo.  The character work was not going to win any of the no-name stars Oscars, but unlike in The Walking Dead, they were not so obvious cardboard clichés that they practically wear signs reading descriptions like “Upright, Moralistic Cop,” “Spunky, Independent Woman” or “Evil Racist Who Probably Voted For Bush #3.”

Now, Romero did make political comments with his movies, though it is unclear whether he intended to do so or whether he just sort of nodded along when goatee-stroking pop culture course professors started pointing them out to bored sophomores seeking an easy elective “A” for watching movies all semester.  Yes, the hero of Night is a black guy, and yeah (spoiler) the sheriff’s posse shoots him at the end – though it seems like they did so because he looked like a zombie instead of out of some arbitrary hatred of African-Americans that was so intense that the posse members felt the need to stop their battle for their survival in order to indulge it.

Dawn is supposed to be some sort of parody of consumerism.  As such, it falls short.  People like to buy stuff – if that’s Romero’s insight, it’s about as profound as a “COEXIST” bumperstickers or John Lennon’s “Imagine” – which is to say, not at all.   But it’s a really good movie, once again probably by lucky accident.  It is filmed with an almost documentary-level lack of finesse and a linoleum and pastel vibe that you had to live through the mid-70’s to really recognize and understand.  The ordinariness of it – the JC Penney’s-style normality of the setting, combined with the uncertainty of that era and the appalling Technicolor violence – made it a truly modern American suburban monster movie.  You couldn’t tell yourself that bad things only happened in Transylvania.  The scary part was that this was Pennsylvania, this was the suburbs, this was us.

The 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake was slicker – hell, everything is slicker than the original Dawn –  but director Zack Snyder also understood the need to have interesting characters doing smart things with plenty of zombies to break up the chatter.  He also kept the gore and bleakness; only his running zombies raised questions among the aficionados.

In 2006, Max Brooks published World War Z, a fascinating “oral history” of a zombie apocalypse.  Using the stories of individual characters, he covers the event from the micro level we had seen in movies (small bands of survivors) to the macro-level, discussing how governments deal with a huge, inexplicable threat to mankind’s survival.  This was the part that was most interesting to me – on my military side, I have worked on catastrophic event planning and operations for two decades and his tome about man-eating cannibal corpses was the most insightful piece of fiction on how people and peoples react to enormous disasters I’ve read.  He draws solid characters, who do smart (and dumb) things, and while there is a ham-fisted indictment of Dick Cheney in there (as if Dick Cheney wouldn’t have opened up a keg of zombie whoop-ass given the opportunity), it is a terrific book with serious insights.

So where has The Walking Dead gone wrong?  The first wrong turn seems to be the idea the producers embraced of focusing almost solely on the people, not the zombies.  No, no, no, no, no.  The point of a zombie movie is how people react to the zombies.  Yeah, they react to each other too, but that’s of distinctly lesser interest.  No one cares about the stupid soap opera “I did your best friend but at the time I thought you were dead but you aren’t and now we gotta deal with this emotional baggage” crap.  This isn’t a telenovela – stop exchanging sensitive looks and shoot some ghouls, damnit!

And have the characters take actions that are remotely intelligent.  At least in Night the folks barricaded the doors – in The Walking Dead, the rag-tag fugitive flunkies gather on a wooded hilltop, vehicles scattered hither and tither, tents pitched here and there.  Security consists of a fat guy with a deer rifle sitting on the roof of his RV in a lawn chair.  You don’t have to have 20+ years in the Army to find this kind of cluster-flunk distracting. 

Part of the fun of apocalyptic fiction is the “What would we do if this really happened?” factor.  I’d probably, you know, find a defensible position with multiple exits and integrate the fighting positions should they get past my outer security.  But apparently, the gang from The Walking Dead would allow the zombies to get close enough to overrun and eat them, if they didn’t die in crashes as everyone tried to turn their cars around to use the single exit route.

And yes, I am aware I’m talking about a zombie show.  But I’m just not ready to include tactical insanity within the scope of my “suspension of disbelief.”  I find it distracting. 

I also find the fact that these people only have about five guns between them bizarre.  The producers decided to center the show on the only group of people in the American South who can’t find guns.  Hell, in Georgia most of the guns themselves own a couple guns.

But then the writers have some odd ideas about Southerners.  The great, scary Michael Rooker plays one Southern guy – I don’t remember his name but it’s probably something like “Merle.”  Guess what?  He’s a redneck racist psycho who hates black people.  Then there’s his brother – his name is “Darryl” or the like.  Guess what he is – do I hear “a redneck racist psycho who hates black people?”  And there’s another Southern guy who seems to hate everyone equally and who also beats up his Southern wife, who is played by someone channeling the silent, abused Alison Janney character in American Beauty.

In short, we get the full variety of Hollywood writer Southern folk stereotypes – both of them.

You can tell the heroes and heroines because they are handsome white men, or spunky/pretty women, or wisecracking minority sidekicks.  Again, these writers are pushing that envelope…inward.

Oh, and only occasionally do we see a zombie, which I find strange, since zombies are kind of the reason there is a show.  It’s like Twilight without shiny vampires.   I guess I should be happy we haven’t been told that the zombie plague is somehow the result of a scheme by Halliburton, in conjunction with Bu$hitler, the Koch Brothers, Big Oil and the reverse vampires.  But I can feel that coming.

Again, this does not make me happy to say.  AMC has a solid track record with its shows.  Frank Darabont, the creative force, is a talented director.  People say good things about the source material, a popular comic book (save your “graphic novel” euphemism for your dork pals, Pointdexter).  AMC is also allowing the kind of gross-out blood-letting we’ve come to expect.  The Walking Dead should be cool, and I really want it to be cool.  Come on, dudes, be cool!

But you can’t be cool and boring, or cool and stupid, or cool and annoying.  We can only hope that in the last few shows of this season, and in the second season, they dump the clichés, smarten-up the characters, and start kicking some zombie asses instead of sitting on their own talking about their feelings.  If not, someone might as well bust a cap in the noggin of this zombie show – a zombie show in both senses of the words.

Despite their insistence that Americans “get over” 9/11 even though we’re still at war with Islamic fundamentalists, the Left refuses to get over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq that we’ve already won. The Hollywood Left, with their “Bush lied, people died,” bumper-sticker brain capacity, are especially determined to keep flogging that dead horse long after American audiences have proven that they reject such defeatist, morally inverted propaganda.

And so if you think a new movie about the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln might make a gripping historical thriller and be refreshingly free of Hollywood lectures about the ill-named War on Terror, you’d be wrong on both counts.

Robert Redford recently unveiled his period piece The Conspirator at the Toronto International Film Festival. It begins with the assassination of Lincoln and centers on one apparent conspirator, Mary Surratt, on trial for providing gunman John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices (including her son) with a location to plot their conspiracy (her boardinghouse) and with other assistance. Mary, who “kept the nest that hatched the egg,” as Andrew Johnson put it, ended up being the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government.

But strangely – or maybe predictably, if you’re as cynical about Hollywood as I am – one figure looms as a more insistent presence in Redford’s courtroom drama than Surratt, Booth or Lincoln: President George W. Bush.

Time’s Richard Corliss gleefully latched onto “the most troubling and satisfying aspect of The Conspirator”: the comparison it draws between the government’s actions immediately after the Lincoln shooting “and the Bush Administration’s actions in the months and years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.”

(In case you’re confused by the bland, generic term “events,” Corliss is referring to the act of war against America by Muslim terrorists; he and the Left, however, want you to get over those attacks and think of them as “events”; and while you’re at it, don’t be an insensitive, racist Islamophobe by mentioning the “Muslim terrorists.”)

Corliss helpfully explains the historical parallel:

In this movie, [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton is the stand-in for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld; he proposes lurid theories of revolution and, when challenged, replies, “Who’s to say these things couldn’t happen?” In a direct parallel to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq as a crowd-pleasing alternative to the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden, one Surratt sympathizer says that Stanton & Co. are trying Mary “because they can’t find John [her son, who temporarily escaped].”

Apart from the fact that our toppling of Saddam Hussein was in no way a mere “crowd-pleasing alternative to the fruitless search” for bin Laden, Corliss is otherwise correct about the post-9/11 parallels. In the immediate aftermath of both the Lincoln assassination and 9/11, the world was changed, no one knew what would happen next, and our leaders had to take swift, decisive – the Left says excessive – actions to seize conspirators, prevent further potentially imminent acts of terrorism, and punish the perpetrators. Redford himself half-hinted, half-confessed that the story “relates very much to the present, but it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves how.”

In the script, novice defense attorney Frederick Aiken (played in the film by James MacAvoy) is assigned to defend Mary (Robin Wright Penn) before a corrupt, closed-door military tribunal bent more on impassioned revenge than dispassionate justice. One soldier, described pointedly as “PATRIOTISM personified,” even commits perjury on the stand to help convict her. Aiken himself initially believes her guilty, but quickly finds the truth to be complicated and the Constitution itself in jeopardy from a military that has taken advantage of the post-assassination panic to exceed the limits of its power. “When the wicked are in authority,” Aiken quotes from the Bible, “transgressions increase.”

And those transgressions include the trampling of our individual rights. The prison cells in The Conspirator are swiftly loaded with hooded innocents swept up in “STANTON’S REIGN OF TERROR” – his roundup of anyone even tangentially connected to the shooting (the caps and underlining are there in the script to make sure you grasp that reestablishing security and order in the hours after Lincoln’s shocking murder constitutes a REIGN OF TERROR; I half-expected the prison to be described as “STANTON’S GUANTANAMO”).

For the Left, the real threat is not avowed American enemies like Islamic fundamentalists, but conservatives playing the “politics of fear” card to seize power and abuse it. As national security expert Woody Harrelson put it: “The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just bullshit.” Sadly, this quote can’t be chalked up entirely to his strict marijuana-and-vegan diet. Harrelson’s comment reflects a willful blindness that consumes most of Hollywood: “There is no terrorist threat,” says noted defense analyst Michael Moore.

And so the heavy handed moralizing about our endangered civil liberties begins early in The Conspirator and is hammered home more loudly and steadily than the nails in Mary Surratt’s gallows:

“None of us is safe when a citizen can be dragged from her home, held without charge and denied access to counsel – merely on a suspicion.”

“Had our founding fathers desired tyranny to prevail, I’m sure they’d have intended for the President and his War Secretary to have such indiscriminate powers.”

“Don’t be so eager to throw away Mary’s rights. One day you may need them.”

“By abandoning our laws we become just like [the enemy].”

“If we’re to be destroyed it will be from within. By failing to protect our Constitution and its laws.”

The Left love to circle the wagons ‘round the Constitution when it suits them to paint conservatives as totalitarian oppressors - and yet no President has ever been a greater threat to our Constitution than radical leftist Barack Obama. In any case, presenting the supposed railroading of Mary Surratt as a metaphor for the Bush administration’s supposed post-9/11 shredding of the Constitution makes for both a thin comparison and a poor story.

Redford’s condemnation isn’t reserved only for the Bush administration. Aiken is defending Mary and America not only from a power-mad military junta, but from a citizen rabble lusting for revenge.“What kind of nation are we, one ruled by laws? Or by the fury of our people?” According to this script, it’s dangerously close to being the latter. Mary is at the mercy of a vengeful mob mentality; Aiken is the lone voice of conscience against a vengeful mob mentality; the generals are driven by their vengeful mob mentality, etc. The parallel being, apparently, that Americans were a vengeful mob after 9/11.

But in fact America did not lust blindly for revenge after the 9/11 attacks; Americans rightly wanted justice but were not, and still are not, out to indiscriminately round up Muslims to hang ‘em high, despite insupportable charges of a tidal wave of Islamophobia made by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR and Obama’s masters at the Organization of the Islamic Conference. And to suggest that we are is further evidence of the Left’s condescension toward, and contempt for, decent Americans.

Though I respect billionaire Joe Ricketts’ patriotic desire – through his new production shingle, the American Film Company – to “make incredible true stories from America’s past,” The Conspirator is an odd and obscure choice for a first film. James Solomon’s screenplay seems notably faithful to the historical facts, as much as a docudrama can be. But it’s a story of very marginal significance in American history, apart from its potential as an emblematic sledgehammer with which to bash the Bush administration. Maybe the AFC was simply overexcited to score Redford as a director, thinking he would deliver another excellent film like Quiz Show; instead, activist Redford couldn’t stop himself from turning out another preachy anti-war bore like his 2007 preachy anti-war bore, Lions for Lambs.

Was the real Mary Surratt guilty of aiding and abetting the conspirators? Almost certainly. That is the historical consensus, and at least one historian, Kate Clifford Larson, was led to that conclusion even though she began her book The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln intending to prove Mary innocent. Mary’s guilt is less a question of debate today than is the severity of her sentence – today she surely would not be put to death. And I think it would make a more interesting mystery if Redford had drawn her as guilty or at least made her role in the conspiracy ambiguous, instead of painting her as such an uninteresting, sanctimonious martyr.

But ultimately, this movie is not about Mary Surratt’s guilt or innocence anyway. The one who’s on trial is George W. Bush.

Well, here’s one way to entice Middle America into your film, insult them by having your three main stars hit the promotional circuit and savage Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin as stupid and evil: 

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QUIZ: What makes you most want to see “Inception” now?

1. Ellen Page’s insufferably cruel sanctimony?

2. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s pathetic, butt-boy me-toosim?

3. Leonardo DiCaprio’s wild hypocrisy?

Actually, “wild hypocrisy” is an understatement….

The same Leo you see in that video belly-aching with so much touching concern over Mother Earth, just happens to be the very same elitist whose PRIVATE jet-setting helped cause the chaos that cost hundreds of World Cup fans — who had spent upwards of $1300 for tickets — the ability to attend the game. Found buried yesterday in the sometimes useful L.A. Times:

The congestion on the ground, caused in part by earlier bad weather on Wednesday and in part by the arrival of large numbers of private aircraft, led to what one British Airways pilot described as “absolute chaos.”

According to a report in Britain’s Financial Times, “Some of the fans had spent upward of $1,300 for semifinals tickets but were stuck in Johannesburg while private jets carrying Spain’s King Juan Carlos, South African President Jacob Zuma, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and socialite Paris Hilton landed.”

Keep in mind that Leo isn’t just any hypocritical Hollywood environmentalist, he is the hypocritical Hollywood environmentalist. If you recall his film “The 11th Hour”:

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Had Leo simply practiced what he preached and flown commerical, maybe things would’ve been a little less chaotic and a few more of those folks wouldn’t have wasted their hard-earned money. But they’re just the great unwashed and Leo is the The Great Movie Star Who Commands From Above, so… whatever.

Leo may want to get in the head of BP’s CEO, but I’d like to get in Leo’s head and understand why someone who believes the planet is in peril would commit an act of genocide against the entire human race by flying around in private jets.

My vote, however, goes to Ellen Page, who just went from the lovable and spunky Juno to a shorter, joyless, less-likable version of Rachel Maddow.

How sheltered of a self-involved little bubble does one have to live in to think speaking the term “holistic intelligence” out loud doesn’t automatically qualify you for the All-Time Top Five Moments Of Hollywood Assholery. Page actually considers herself a feminist and yet here she is trashing the compassion and questioning the intelligence of a self-made Governor raising a special-needs child as her oldest son serves in Iraq.

What’s young Page’s claim to intelligence and compassion fame. Oh, that’s right, she’s a celebrity.

Man, I wish I’d never seen this video. I love Christopher Nolan and have been dying to see “Inception.” But goodwill matters and this Terrible Trio of Tactlessness just dropped the needle on that meter way below the half-way point.

The concept behind Troopathon is not a new idea, put on a Jerry Lewis style telethon to benefit a worthy cause, but a Troopathon is groundbreaking and innovative in that we bring together famous celebrities from radio, television, movie stars, musicians, journalists, and more to create a one-of-a-kind event with one purpose – to support our troops on the front lines in the war on terror and honor their service and sacrifice for our nation.

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Our third annual Troopathon, titled “Standing for Our Soldiers” promises to be the best yet! Keep coming back and checking troopathon.org as further details will be forthcoming!