{"id":15662,"date":"2008-05-26T11:10:32","date_gmt":"2008-05-26T15:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15662.html"},"modified":"2008-05-26T11:10:32","modified_gmt":"2008-05-26T15:10:32","slug":"im-sure-recount-is-a-great-movie-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/im-sure-recount-is-a-great-movie-but\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m sure ‘Recount’ is a great movie, but…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine asked me yesterday whether I planned to watch HBO’s “Recount<\/a>,” 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<\/a>, whose work I usually like.<\/p>\n

The problem is, the subject matter is just a little too painful. I nodded a lot while reading Atrios’ take<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>,” because the fiasco is “so old by now<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

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.
\n
\nPost Script<\/i>: 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

HBO threw Warren Christopher under the bus. […]<\/p>\n

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. […]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Did any of you watch? Should I suck it up and take a look?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}