Simply Fictional
Stacy Drake has a detailed and excellent piece over on Breitbart.com about the ridiculous HBO movie “Game Change,” that portrays Gov. Sarah Palin as a loosely-hinged, catatonic, desperate candidate in its re-telling of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Drake debunks the narrative, in part by comparing the time-stamps placed throughout the movie with what went on in reality. Through Drake’s impeccable research, it’s clear that the time-stamps and the movie are purely fictional. I haven’t seen the film, as I don’t get HBO, and wouldn’t pay $0.50 per year for all the swill they air, but what’s remarkable about this film is not how poorly it portrays reality, but apparently that they didn’t even try. Instead, from all reports I’ve read, what viewers will see is a fantasy story as told by leftists through the eyes of the man most responsible for the failure of Senator John McCain’s 2008 Presidential bid: His own campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, portrayed by Woody Harrelson in the movie.
I suppose that’s the price of trying to rebuild one’s reputation. Schmidt was willing to give Hollywood the kind of story it wanted, and the sort of narrative it needed to further propagate its institutional view of Sarah Palin in particular, but all conservatives in general. Schmidt was apparently willing to spin his fantasy in order to recover his reputation, but the simple truth is that what sunk McCain wasn’t Sarah Palin – she almost saved his campaign – but instead the awful advice of Schmidt. It was he who advised John McCain to suspend his campaign when the financial crisis erupted, telling McCain he should shut things down long enough to go to Washington DC, propose and push a solution, and then ride out of town to restart his campaign as the conquering hero. That was the substance of Schmidt’s great idea, and it flopped, miserably.
You can’t botch a campaign that looked like it had a decent shot at winning without people immediately beginning to wonder about incompetence or sabotage, and it was against these charges that Schmidt created his fanciful narrative about Palin being less-than-ready, and barely held-together, and as an emotional wreck incapable of holding things together. Of course, Hollywood couldn’t wait to turn that narrative into a film, because it suits their own preconceived notions about who Governor Palin is, what she is like, and how she performed. Other than Schmidt and his apologists, nobody from the McCain-Palin team actually supports this portrayal, but that didn’t matter to producer Tom Hanks. He had another agenda, and that is the destruction of Sarah Palin.
What you learn from this entire fiasco of a film(more from its making than from its viewing) is that the left and the GOP establishment, and the permanent political class of Washington DC are most frequently willing to work together where their interests intersect. For the left, portraying Governor Palin as a loose canon and an emotional wreck, along with being uninformed on issues of national import serves a narrative they wish to create not merely for 2012, but for all times. Since the campaign of 2008, when they noticed her power with the electorate, they have been out to destroy her, and the left has gotten no shortage of assistance in this endeavor from the GOP establishment. When the film was being made, they were expecting Palin to enter the 2012 race, and they timed its release for what they thought would be the moment in which they would take her down. She had the temerity to confound their plan by not running. Ooops.
Of course, Schmidt is more interested in trying to re-make the narrative to portray himself as basically the only hero in the story. In one sense, it’s self-serving, but in another, it’s pure self-preservation because what most political analysts understand is that it was his strategy that sunk John McCain, and not the choosing of Sarah Palin as his running mate. This means that while the Game Change plot may help to apply some salve to Schmidt’s bruised ego and reputation, it won’t be among the serious political strategists among whom he would consider himself a peer. It’s bad enough to louse up an election, but what is inexcusable is to try to blame it on the only person who actually did anything to save the McCain campaign.
Stacy Drake sums it up well in her debunking of the Game Change lie:
“The sources used by HBO to sell this notion that Palin is “unstable” have no credibility. That didn’t stop them from running with it because as many have pointed out recently, they themselves have an agenda. The timing of this film was originally designed to harm Palin in this year’s presidential contest, but she decided not to run.”
“So the left had to settle for trying to harm any future political aspirations she may have in the future. They want to define Sarah Palin for the country, and they want people to believe that she is unstable, therefore, unfit for office.”
“This won’t work, however, because what they claim transpired in Philadelphia never happened. The timeline of real events prove the cruelest of lies to be false.”
Game Change, the movie, made to smear Sarah Palin. Game Change, the narrative, was created to rehabilitate the reputations of self-serving politicos. If you’re going to watch this, be advised that it’s a work of pure fiction, and the beneficiaries are the same people who brought you Barack Obama. All of them.
