HBO and Palin

HBO has made a movie that, though unbroadcast as yet, has been roundly attacked by its right wing critics, who, as always, see it as being the most obscene of crimes not to be automatically on their side. The movie, "Game Change," is based on a book of the same name, and it is about the part of the 2008 Presidential campaign that involved J. McCain reaching way up into Alaska and improbably picking as his running mate the female governor there, S. Palin. These Fox-Limbaugh types are screaming that the film's trailer casts Palin in a bad light.

The obvious rejoinder among I would say the majority of observers is, how can any movie that claims to contain large doses of the truth about that event not cast S. Palin in a bad light?

One example of this purported mean-spiritedness has Julianne Moore, as Palin, saying that she has to win this, because "I so don't want to go back to Alaska."

What is so damning about that? And Palin's behavior during that time, climaxed by her resigning as the governor soon after she and McCain had indeed lost the election, strongly pointed to the likelihood that indeed she didn't want to go back up there amongst the glaciers, nose to nose with the Russians just across the bay. And where has she, or at least that part of her body up above her shoulders, been ever since? Not at all in Nome but on the Fox Phewey Channel instead.

One interesting thing about this is that "Game Change" looks to take its place (alongside any project depicting Valerie Plame, the outed CIA agent of Iraqgate times) as one of those rare films in which a historical female personage in appearance actually outshines the actress playing her. Julianne Moore is a great, adventurous actress, and she is an attractive woman, but, by the testimony at least of the one still shot that I saw, she still doesn't have quite what Palin has, though on the outside only. In all other respects Moore is, of course, way ahead of the said, sad woman.

(Extra-Added Note: I have a relative who holds some kind of high position at HBO, after having been there most of her adult life. She is the granddaughter of one of my first cousins, a guy that I knew well and who was like my second father, though he is now long deceased, and I guess that makes K. my third cousin. She is so fair that I had wondered whether most of the people at HBO knew of her derivation. But my wife just informed me of something that I didn't know, namely that K. has always made a big point of proudly telling the HBO people that she is a Rainbow. Forgive me. Maybe that was because I also had an uncle who for years "passed" as "white" in Chicago, and I strongly doubt that that was ever revealed, up there. The difference in the two eras must have determined what one could afford and the other couldn't.)