I’m sure ‘Recount’ is a great movie, but…

May 26, 2008

A friend of mine asked me yesterday whether I planned to watch HBO’s “Recount,” a movie about the 2000 election fiasco in Florida. I admitted that I would not. It’s not that it doesn’t look like a good movie. In fact, I’m sure it’s great — the cast is terrific, and it was directed by Jay Roach, whose work I usually like.

The problem is, the subject matter is just a little too painful. I nodded a lot while reading Atrios’ take.

HBO’s showing their dramatization of the 2000 post-election fiasco this evening. They were kind enough to send me a screener, but ultimately I just couldn’t watch it. I even kept turning off CNN today when they were showing clips.

That whole saga was just really traumatic. It was my “holy shit everything is really screwed up” moment when I suddenly realized that all of our elites — politicians, supremos, and especially the media — did not deserve the modest naive faith that I had given them. I’m not saying that I lacked any cynicism about the various institutions before, but just watching the media piss on our Democracy over that time period was incredibly jarring.

You’d think enough time has passed that I wouldn’t still care so much about what transpired in (where else?) Florida eight years ago. Antonin Scalia recently said people like me need to “get over it,” because the fiasco is “so old by now.”

Perhaps. I’m not sure if the events of 2000 can fairly be described as “so old,” but either way, when a team steals a presidential election, it hurts — enough to steer clear of a movie about the theft.

Post Script: It looks like John Cole, who was a Republican in 2000 and has less of a reason to share my resentment, tuned in to HBO last night and came away impressed.

HBO threw Warren Christopher under the bus. […]

They threw Katherine Harris under a fleet of busses, and are now backing them up over her and preparing for another run over her body. […]

Actually, a pretty good movie, and while shot from the perspective of the Gore team, it was very careful to not do the simplistic good/evil portrayals of the Gore/Bush team you might have expected.

I am still troubled by the notion of counting “dimpled” chads, but overall, I have to say we sure have a screwed up way of electing people.

Did any of you watch? Should I suck it up and take a look?

May 26, 2008 at 11:13 am

I’m not watching it either, so I guess I’m in good company.

I have the same response…it is just too recent, however John Cole’s take does give me pause…maybe after the Dems take over in January ’09 I might be able too. (I can’t watch stuff on the ongoing Iraq/Afghanistan occupation, the real stuff is horrible enuf).

As long as we’re told we should “just move on” from things like what happened after the 2000 election (& the ramp-up to the Iraq war, too, which bothers me even more), the country will continue to suffer & continue to fade. For a long while, we led the world, and we accepted it as our due. Now, we lead the world only in foolishness (global warming deniers), venality (big oil, etc) and stupidity (Fourth Estate, the Republican Party). In order to stop the downward slide, we have to go back, acknowledge the mistakes of the past, and learn from them.

But we won’t, of course.

The “get over it” and “old news” memes are what will make it possible to steal 2008.

I’ve been waiting for the Right to go after this as an example of the “lib’rul medja” trying to get people all het up against the patriotic Amurrikins who fought to save their country from the dread AlGore.

Personally, I think the movie is great, not having seen it, just because it does get quite close to the truth – a truth that lots of Americans didn’t know – so the end result can be a whole lot more people seriously pissed off at the Republiscum and upset about the right wing coup we suffered. That can only help in November.

shillary is helping too, by “catapulting the propaganda” that Obama can’t win because of one region’s racist white votes is more important than millions of other voters across the country.

More than 80 percent of Americans want change and mclame is promising more of the same – they are gonna need a lot of propaganda to steal 2008.

You can’t make this stuff up…

I lasted through about 20 minutes — enough to see how most of the characters were portrayed. I couldn’t take any more after that. It was bad enough to experience the recount and Court decision. It is excruciating to relive it knowing what happened in the last 8 years.

But I agree with Tom Cleaver that it might be useful to educate people on little-known facts, e.g., that there was no machine recount in one third of the counties.

My god, I thought I was the only one who wasn’t going to watch it because it’s too painful.

However, I may buy it when it’s released on DVD in a few months and watch it then, though I don’t know how a “few months” can possibly make a difference.

I was actually much more bummed out after the 2004 election, when I realised that more than 59,000,000 of my fellow Americans, knowing what they knew, voted for George W Bush. I was ‘pressed for months.

I don’t get HBO, don’t own a DVD player, hate watching movies on TV. So I guess the luddite audience will remain unmoved;>
Besides: Based on a true story means “Fiction”. Do we really want people getting their political information from Made for TV movies (or movies of any sort, including Michael Moore?)

I can’t watch republican evil-mongering of any kind. Even when it is portrayed fairly (i.e. as the evil-mongering it really is). Even when it is satire. I just can’t watch it. So even if I had HBO (I don’t), I wouldn’t have watched this. I can’t watch Steven Colbert for the same reason. And I certainly can’t watch most interviews and talk shows anymore, what with the way they put on these incredibly slimy agents of evil in republican garb and pretend that they are fair-minded, mainstream people who deserve a soap box.

I stick to newspapers and blogs for my access to the political happenings of the day. There I don’t have to watch it (unless they have video clips, and even then it is my choice whether or not to play them), and I can handle reading about it.

little bear at #4 said: “The “get over it” and “old news” memes are what will make it possible to steal 2008.” While I hope his prediction doesn’t come true (and I know he does too), I want to reinforce what he says – by predicting that Pres. Obama’s administration will be under lots of pressure to “move on” rather than finally investigate the many crimes of the executive office in the past 8 years. I imagine that Shrub will try to give all his cronies get out of jail free cards as his last act in office, but if he does, that means that they can be held in contempt, and jailed, for refusing to answer questions on the grounds of self-incrimination.

We cannot let lying the country into war, torture, suspension of habeus corpus, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, etc. etc. ad nauseum, slide. If we don’t do all we can to root out the evil that has infested our government during the Shrub years, we admit that evil into a permanent place in the system. We cannot give in to the urgings of Publicans (and, no doubt, DLC DINOs) to “just move on.”

I didn’t watch the movie because I don’t have cable. But I plan to when I can because we need to keep reminding ourselves of what can happen when we turn a blind eye to what we think we can’t do anything about.

I got agitated just looking at the ad for the show in the paper yesterday. I nearly had to walk out of Fahrenheit 911 because it opened with the recount scenes. I knew there was no way that I could watch this show.

What Stephen1947 said.

Yo, Martin at # 9 – where exactly DO you think we should be getting our political information? I don’t think you’re a luddite necessarily, but you certainly sound like someone who would argue that we can’t stop ourselves from being assaulted so we might as well just give in.

Personally, I don’t think made-for-TV movies or advocacy documentaries are any worse or better than any other source – it’s just a good idea to have several sources and look for the “truth” wherever you find inconsistencies.

I asked a friend to tape it for me, since I don’t get HBO. But I can’t wait to see it. While I am late to the blog culture, I was watching it closely on TV at the time, and baed on recent interviews with Toobin and Spacey, I am expecting to learn from it. Furthermore, Howard Kurtz wrote such a bizarre review of it, that I think it’s worth seeing, if only to find out why he feels the need to make such disingenuos conclusions. Unfortunately, his article “A Question for HBO: How About a Recount of the Facts?” was shortened and given a less absurd title on-line. In the original article the only “fact” he challenges is that the movie apparently suggests there was only one Supreme Court Hearing, while Kurtz claims there were two. While there were two separate decisions issued, I cannot find any evidence that there were actually separate hearings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/23/AR2008052302887.html

Anyone that would proclaim that cnn, faux, msnbc somehow are better vehicles for news than documentaries….

Well, it just too stoooooopid a point to even acknowledge.

Unlike the maintream news (tv, radio, newpapers, pundits, journalists, “experts”) that proclaimed there were WMD in Iraq and Saddam was behind 9/11, there were no documentaries full of these lies.

Too painful for me to consider watching.

And I still have never watched any of the iconic movies about the Vietnam war – Coming Home, The Deerhunter etc. for the same reason.

But I like Apocalypse Now, and get fascinated by it in the first minute, even if I start in the middle. But it isn’t really about Vietnam. The story is only set there.

“Get over it,” Mr. “Justice” Scalia? I can’t. It’s still going on. America won’t recover fully from the fiasco of the Bush years (and the election that you helped to steal) in my lifetime.

I watched the second half and it is quite disturbing and painful to watch. But we need to, and we need to encourage others to do the same.

To watch that story with the knowledge of how the Bush administration has turned out is eye-opening. Everything that has happened in the last 8 years is present and visible right there, at the beginning of the Bush administration: the ruthlessness, the corruption, the manipulation of the media, the contempt for constitutional order, the willingness to subvert the balance of powers between the branches.

A large portion of the voting public has turned against Bush, but is still sorting their way through to how this disaster was not the result of one rather dim man, but the inevitable result of this modern movement conservative Republican party. Florida 2000 shows how corrupt this administration has been from the very beginning. We have been ruled for 8 years by an illegitimate regime.

There should come a time that the entire Florida thing should be investigated under oath, and the entire corrupt mess laid bare. We will bring closure to the Bush administration when we impeach all of the living members of the Supreme Court who voted in favor of Bush. It is a profound admission of their guilt of betraying their office that their ruling was bracketed, setting no precedent — an admission that it was based on no legal principle that would apply in any other situation — but driven entirely by the desire to reach a particular result.

I Tivo’d it to get the first half and will probably buy the DVD to lend to friends. As traumatic as it is, we have to go back to the scene of the crime.

I have to disagree, which happens rarely for me with this site. The story should be told over and over, with emphasis on what happened and who did it. There should be prosecutions among the pols, and those in the media and the Democratic party who colluded should be named and made to live with their disgrace. After limping along for decades, the country was stolen outright. It must never be allowed to happen again. It will never be old, or too late for justice. There is no statute of limitations on treason.

ericfree – don’t think anyone is saying much different. Some of us are already aware of what happened, how it happened, and how the theft of elections was further refined to steal 2004.

Most here support the documentary and believe it has an important message. The real question is how do we get that message out to more people.

For those of us that followed this in 2000 (and 2004), watching the movie doesn’t change anything.

I couldn’t subject myself to it, either. Went grocery shopping instead, and I HATE grocery shopping.

The reason I, and I suspect many others, can’t “get over it” is that it’s not over.

The events in FL and eventually the SC changed the course of history in a way that is neither benign nor can it be undone. All of the new “realities” we’ve watched Bush/Cheney and their gang of Merry Assholes create over the past seven years trace directly back to FL and the SC. And despite the absurdity behind those new “realities,” many have become all too real. Some we may never unravel. They fucked with the timeline.

I watched “Recount” last night at my sister’s, since she has HBO. It was a painful experience, but I did learn something. Specifically, about the 18 counties who never did the machine recount they were ordered to do. In addition, I had forgotten Lieberman’s role at this time, and it was a real refresher course. If there’s any silver lining to Gore’s loss, it’s only that Lieberman would be running for President this year as the Democratic candidate if Gore had won. Grasping at straws to contain grief, I admit. Here’s an article about Lieberman and the 2000 election.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-weissman/joe-lieberman-2000-and-2_b_26947.html

For me, that move was Flight 93. The country I thought I knew died with the people on that plane, and the US, and the world, will never be the same. We went from the brink of an American century, to just another country. I couldn’t watch it.

Pain or not everyone of us should watch it. We have, and continue to watch, films of Auschwitz to remind us of evil and how evil accomplishes its ends. This film is a reminder of evil, horrible as it is, and our energies need to be rekindled by it.

I didn’t watch it, but that’s because I devoted the evening to the Phoenix landing on Mars.

I must say that the event that gets most to me is Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. To me, the Florida story pales in comparison, as awful as it is. Bush got away with the crimes of the century, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and nobody seems to care. He wrecked another country for no reason at all, and ours has been crippled as well. Not just in blood and treasure, but in opportunities lost and sagging spirits as we look upon what this once great country has lowered itself to.

I agree with Scalia. We all just need to get over it, ’cause it’s just so old. Now…that means everyone is going to get over that other old one after it’s 8 year mark next year, too, right? What was it called?

Oh yeah – 9/11.

I’d be glad to stop banging my drum if they’d stop banging theirs.

Scalia – what a nimrod.

I did watch it with the same pain I felt during the 2000 devastation. The important reason to keep this all alive is to stop
*Disenfranching the blacks
*People from voting who’s name is close to convicted felons
*PRIVATE Dibolt Voting Machines that could/did get changed to anyone the Dibolt people (republican supporters) wanted to win.
*And of course the Hanging Chads.

This November watch all the states that REQUIRE votes to show proof of identity or even citizenship.

Why would the repubs want to win the legal way when they can win with all these other methods.

We need to change ALL the states to consistent legal voting that cannot be changed.

I didn’t watch it. I consider it too painful and will likely raise my blood pressure again. Maybe I’ll see after the November elections when hopefully things will be somewhat righted.

Someday we’ll hear about the tens of thousands of centrally ‘spoiled’ ballots from Duval Co. and the ex-parte contacts between the Bush people in Houston and Scalia.

And then the story will be rewritten.

It will, however, be too late to save the Republic, which was killed on 12/12/2000.

Historians with the benefit of hindsight will make that, and not 9/11, the date on all the AP history exams of the 22nd century.

I get how painful this whole ordeal was. Still though, we have to watch. If we don’t, if we turn our heads we could open the door for another round of deceipt. How can a party argue that recounting votes when the initial difference between candidates was less than 1000 is a problem. Their very argument should give all of us pause. The Reps argued – vehemently – that there should be no recount. Why? If it’s so close and we’re all being honest why wouldn’t they want to have additional information? Why is it that in 2 counties there were negative votes tallied for Gore? How is that possible if there was no tampering? Be very afraid. It just happened to ocurr in W’s brothers state where they were in bed with katherine Harris…. I strongly doubt that was a coincidence.

The Florida recount remains an open wound for me. Yet I saw the movie and I’m glad I did. The movie stuck closely to the truth and did a great job of recreating those painful events. It did throw Warren Christopher (and Bill Daley) under a bus, as it did Katherine Harris, who is portrayed as the pinhead/apparatchik she was and is. Harris would not have been where she was were it not for inherited money, and is a poster girl for making the estate tax confiscatory. Laura Dern’s portrayal of Harris was brilliant. It is sweet that the GOP itself subsequently threw Harris under a bus when she attempted to run for the US Senate.

The movie performs a public service by reminding the country of the illegitimacy of George W. Bush’s takeover of the presidency; it was a coup d’etat pure and simple. Eight years of Bush disasters later, the Supreme Court’s decision, the GOP’s criminality, and Gore and Lieberman’s fecklessness (particularly Lieberman) loom large indeed in the history of the country. I’m glad that Gore has rehabilitated himself. Lieberman, of course, became worse.

I watched it, twice even. What needed more emphasis was the 20k of voters that were purged from the roles because their name was ‘close to’ that of a convicted felon among other things.

I’m glad the movie was made (and apparently well done), and I hope a lot of people watch it, since I think many people still don’t realize how thoroughly that election was stolen. As for myself, I already know, and therefore don’t see any point in torturing myself. I’ll just keep giving $$ to Obama, and hoping things can change.

I got home about an hour into it and tried to watch. I couldn’t. It was making my head explode as I reviewed everything I remembered and then saw the dramatization. Any vestige of respect I had for our governmental institutions was destroyed by that election and also by what happened in Ohio in 2004. I don’t need to relive any of it. It’s vivid enough and will always be. Scalia can think what he wants, but he has to know somewhere in that perverted brain of his that Bush v. Gore disgraced the Supreme Court and reduced it to nothing more than an arm of the Rethug party.

I’ve got it DVRed and plan on watching it tonight or tomorrow at some point. While the election itself was gut-wrenching at the time, I can remember saying to myself when it was all over, “Well, it’s only four years. What’s the worst that can happen?” And then, from inauguration day to today we’ve experienced a daily sampling of the absolute worst that can happen — culminating in the 2004 election. And beyond.

I anticipate that the most heartbreaking aspect for me will be watching it in retrospect, knowing the disasters that will follow. Like seeing that heartless asshole grin into the camera to commemorate tragedy after tragedy.

Meanwhile, I’m reading Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. And I have to say, it is about as depressing and eye-opening a read as I’ve ever experienced. By which I mean, it’s a must read.

I couldn’t watch it. It was the Original Sin of the Bush nightmare and the tragedies are still unfolding. We will be dealing with the consequences for decades to come, no matter who gets elected in 2008.

I wonder if an everyday German would have been enthused, in the winter of 1944/45, about watching a film about the political maneuvering that led to Hitler’s appointment to Chancellor in 1933.

Contrary to Scalia’s opinion, some things you never “get over.”

How do you get over that moment in time when a coup was installed in America? When the republican brownshirts (known as the Brooks brothers suits group) intimidated unchallenged our democratic process? When democracy as we knew it…ended.

This was the nazi-neocon rise to power that brought on 9/11. Had Gore become president Cheney would not have been able to orchestrate and pull off 9/11 and millions of people would still be alive. Little bear would have to comment without using the term ‘shillary’.

The horrors of our current disaster, torture, loss of habeas corpus all can be attributed to that Florida incident. It is one of the most painful memories of modern American History and like the death of MLK (and no, by mentioning this doesn’t mean I’m calling for the assassination of Obama) it shamed America. There is no forgetting and I’ll “get over it” when what it caused has all been rectified, including the removal of certain Supreme Court Justices.

btw…Catherine Harris deserves to be highlighted for what she is.

The 2000 election was an attack on our Democratic elective process just as Sept. 11 was an attack on our Democracy. Should we “get over ” one and not the other?
Wish we could “get over Scalia”, but we just have to hope for an early retirement.
Maybe Uncle Dick will miss again next duck hunt…

Yes, CB. Watch it so we don’t have to. (Brave of me to say, sure.)

Report back any interesting minutiae of the process that might have been unclear at the time. (Or, failing that, that it was cut and dried nepotism…)

If you never get around to it, don’t blame ya.

OK, just finished watching it. Recount did a good job of putting the events of the 2000 election in chronological order and actually helped me remember the events without the monocle of rage through which I typically view them. The election wasn’t stolen at gunpoint, but instead pick-pocketed by a few light-fingered Republicans in key positions.

The primary lessons appear to be: that a democracy is hardly infallible; that election results are never concrete; that a two-party political system wreaks havoc on reality; that Democrats will always be the underdog; that the rule of law is not an end but a means to it; and that Katherine Harris is a vacuous, self-absorbed skank [and Laura Dern deserves an Emmy for her portrayal].

Painful? Hell yeah. As painful to watch as any “State of the Union” or press conference or landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier our Asshole in Chief has conducted. Yes, it’s painful to watch.

But, you and I should be thinking about this pain when we’re sitting around talking to friends who still aren’t quite sure who they’re going to vote for come election day. If you or someone you know says that, if their Democratic candidate doesn’t get the nod, they’re going to vote for McCain, just remember the pain of the last seven plus years. If you’ve got a stoner friend who just can’t seem to register to vote, help him out. If you’ve got a racist friend in West Virginia or Kentucky, or a sexist friend in Alabama, kick the shit out of them. Let the pain remind you how much is at stake this year, how far we’ve fallen, and how much we’ve lost. And let the pain be a constant reminder of one simple truth:

Anything — ANYTHING — has to be better than the last seven plus years.

[See what I mean about the “monocle of rage?”

From http://daily411.blogspot.com/2008/05/recount.html:

There is one moderately amusing aspect of the story: Leave it to the Republican apologist not to know the difference between “busses” and “buses,” although with Katherine Harris’s track record, he might’ve known whereof he spoke.

I’ll steal a line from Petulant at Shakesville to describe my feelings, which was something like: “I’ll get over 2000 when religious right conservatives get over Roe v Wade.”

Gore won the popular vote, but lost the election. As a Clinton supporter I can tell you many of us share that same feeling today. We are watching the strongest general election candidate being ‘thrown under the bus’ for what could prove to be a remake of the McGovern campaign.

BAC

I watched it and it was painful, but it is also an important film. I learned some things I did not know which added to the pain, but the one thing we must never do is “get over it.” There is a significant part of the population who definitely want us not to watch and to “get over it,” but I think the film should be watched over and over again until we get the fair elections we are entitled to. This movie tells the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts, but as has already been pointed out it is not as painful as watching George W Bush, the product of a bloodless coup, give his arrogant meaningless speeches.

This takeover of our fair election process has done damage that will never be repaired in our lifetime, and it can never happen again. Too many lives have been lost and too much treasure has been stolen by these thugs for us to just say we can’t watch because it is too painful. We have to make some serious changes in our process or it could indeed happen again. It will be on again; I encourage everyone to watch it.

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