`Lil' Bush': a cartoon take on the prez

[Jolie Rouge]

`Lil' Bush': a cartoon take on the prez
By FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer
1 hour, 47 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Like most political satire, "Lil' Bush" pinpoints the logical extreme of real life.

Take its title character. Lil' George Bush is a pushy if none-too-swift lad making mischief with his pals from Beltway Elementary: Lil' Condi, Lil' Cheney and Lil' Rummy (pint-size versions of Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld). Another thing: Lil' George resides in the White House.

Oh, sure, this new Comedy Central cartoon show does take lil' liberties with the truth. For instance, "Lil' Bush" is set in the present, yet George H.W. (not George W.) Bush is the nation's chief executive. And though Lil' Cheney mutters in an indecipherable growl (seem familiar?), his practice of biting off the heads of live chickens has no basis in real life.

On the premiere (Wednesday at 10:30 p.m. EDT), Lil' George and his chums go to Iraq in hopes of tracking down some good news about the war to cheer up his dad for Father's Day.

But once they arrive, where will the kids look?

"Right here: Baghdad!" says Lil' George between explosions. "It's got `Dad' right in it!"

The episode's other tale finds Lil' George, inexperienced with the opposite sex, betting his friends he can get a girl to kiss him. "What about ME, Lil' George?" says Condi, who suffers from an unrequited crush on him.

"Yeah," says Lil' George, oblivious like always, "you can be in on the bet, too."

Created by Donick Cary, whose credits include writing for David Letterman and a stint on "The Simpsons" as writer-producer, "Lil' Bush" is "this fantastical Bush World bridging the two Bush presidencies, where anything can happen.

"Now that I've gotten inside Lil' George's head, I really like the guy," adds Cary. "He's got nuclear weapons AND little-kid emotions!" Indeed, when Lil' George is left by Dad unsupervised in the Oval Office, he launches nukes at schoolmates Lil' Hillary, Lil' John Kerry and Lil' Howie Dean.

Although Cary thinks D.C.'s political scene resembles a class of rowdy fifth graders, he contends the man who inspired Lil' George is better suited than most to a show like "Lil' Bush."

"Somehow, this president that we have lends himself to thinking in a simplistic, cartoony fashion," Cary says. "He's always been about sound bites, one-word answers, move ahead, act from the gut."

In fact, it can be hard to tell who's spoofing who: Lil' George complains, "I hate doing what I'm told. I want to be a decider!" Whereas in a recent speech, his real-life counterpart told an Ohio audience, "My job is a job to make decisions. I'm a decision — if the job description were, what do you do, it's Decision Maker. And I make a lot of big ones and I make a lot of little ones."

At 38, Cary is a veteran decider, too, where comedy is concerned, and he insists the main strategery for "Lil' Bush" is delivering laughs.

Even so, at times the humor packs a punch. In one episode, Lil' George and his gang protest an unwanted menu change in the school cafeteria by torturing the cafeteria workers a la Abu Ghraib.

Will the president's supporters take issue with "Lil' Bush"?

"The good news is, 68 percent of the country aren't his supporters anymore — or whatever the number is," says Cary, pretty close to the number in a poll released last week. "But we aren't backing away from viewer criticism. I would have loved this to get on, the first year of his administration."

"Lil' Bush" premiered last fall on cell phones as five-minute mobisodes. Apparently the first such series to cross over from cellular to TV, "Lil' Bush" has been fleshed out for Comedy Central into 12-minute stories, complete with beefed-up animation.

There's also new voice talent, including Iggy Pop with his deep, forceful voice playing Lil' Rummy (alongside Cary's mom, Mara, who continues as Lil' George's mother, Barbara Bush).

It was shortly after the punk-rock pioneer came aboard that Rumsfeld stepped down as secretary of defense. Cary had to be a decider: Should he assign Lil' George a different friend? "We said, `We can't lose Lil' Rummy — we've got Iggy Pop!'" How cool was that! "There was NO way Lil' Rummy was leaving."

Besides, Iggy Pop's style pays homage to the way the Bush administration tackled running the country: "Dive in headfirst. Break stuff up. Don't care what people think. It's VERY punk-rock!"

Along with "Lil' Bush," Cary plans to create more cell-phone series for Amp'd Mobile, and has other TV projects in the works.

Meanwhile, he isn't troubled that "Lil' Bush" takes its cue from a president leaving office in a season and a half.

As Cary explains, "You do pilots and you think, `I'm gonna reinvent TV! It's gonna be on for 20 years!'" Like the pilot he wrote for the WB, a dream project about his childhood on Nantucket Island, Mass.: "I handed it in. The next day I read in the trades, `WB folds tent.'

"So why NOT do something that may have just a two-year shelf life, but that people will laugh at and talk about? And something that's gonna get on TV!"

Poking fun at the Decider-in-Chief? For Cary, that was an easy decision to make.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070611/ap_en_tv/ap_on_tv_lil_bush;_ylt=ArG0jar45lIdSPOFuV9.I9ZY24c A

On the Net: http://www.comedycentral.com

[stresseater]

Sounds like it would be a hoot. Too bad I don't have cable or sat. tv. :star:

[Bahet]

Oh geez thank you! I would have missed this. I will be recording it for DH so he can watch it when he gets home. (He's in Thailand, been in Kuwait since Jan '06 and comes home for good in about 5 weeks!)

[Jolie Rouge]

This is an example of the present "Do As I Say, Not As I Do" mentality. If something like this was presented depicting the current Administration it would be derided as hateful, racist, and disrespectful of the dignity of the POTUS.

[Jolie Rouge]

:hmmmm2: A series blatantly lampooning Bush Administration is okay ... but a thread posted about another series drawing allusions to the Obama administration is not ?

http://www.bigbigforums.com/thats-entertainment/630216-anyone-remember-1980-s-mini-series-v.html#post96222698

[Jolie Rouge]

Is Battlestar Galactica Relevant in the Obama Era?

Major plot points from Battlestar Galactica were also front page headlines over the past few years: terrorism, secret tribunals, prisoner abuse, war. Will the show continue to feel relevant with Obama running America?

With only a few episodes left in the series, BSG is about to disappear from the airwaves. The question is whether it will stand the test of time as the world changes. We've got three reasons why Battlestar might remain relevant in years ahead, and three reasons why it might be headed for the ashcan of history.

Why it's still relevant: Stirring portrait of multicultural, gender-equal leadership.

The Fleet is a good example of what leadership might look like in a post-Obama America. One of the most powerful stories that BSG tells is of a community whose leadership is mixed-race and gender-equal. Admiral Adama is the Caprican equivalent of Latino, while characters like Gaeta, Dualla, and Tory are mixed-race. And women occupy some of the highest positions in the government and the military. While some shows might make a big deal out of this, and smarm you with PC unctuousness, BSG simply takes it for granted that its human society is racially mixed. Certainly there are racial issues, such as the dark-skinned Sagittarans being oppressed by the lighter-skinned Capricans. But the Sagittaran vs. Caprican conflict is really about economic power: The Sagittarans are poor, and that's what makes them powerless - not the color of their skins. BSG's mixed race future is part of that "hope" which the Obama Administration promises.

Why it's in the ashcan of history: Stale liberal siege mentality.
During the presidential campaign, fans of The Daily Show often asked whether the underdog liberal satire show could survive in a liberal administration, and you should be asking the same question about BSG. This smart scifi allegory about US politics may lose its edge now. For example, the new anti-cylon racism plot already feels like a rehash of stale liberal siege mentality - and stale BSG plots. Zarek and Gaeta's mutiny plot feels like something written for the Bush Era, a cautionary tale of what happens when xenophobia creeps into national policy. But President Obama has turned these kinds of cautionary tales into the stuff of campaign speeches. BSG no longer feels like a healthy dose of social criticism. Instead it's in lockstep with the party line espoused by one of the world's most powerful leaders.

Why it's still relevant: Though most of the show is about war, it is also about the thorny road to peace.
BSG tells a timeless story of the horrors of war and the ambiguous nature of peace. Obama may or may not make good on his promise to end the US occupation of Iraq, but assuming he does the scars of war will linger for generations. The high-intensity, emotionally ravaging battles in BSG - especially during the Cylon occupation of New Caprica - will never get stale. At the same time, the show manages to depict how difficult and slow the peace process is. This season's revelations about Starbuck's mysterious identity - is she cylon? something else? - allow BSG's creators to deal with what happens to people whose lives have been shaped by war. How will Starbuck adjust to peace? How will other Fleet members adjust to the idea that she's a human transformed by cylon technology? At the same time, the Tigh and Six plot promises to deal with the same thing. Theirs is a war baby, and its fate is tied to the fragile peace between human and cylon.

Why it's in the ashcan of history: The torture years are over.
Now that Obama has shut down Gitmo and other foreign prisons, we lack that feeling of panicked recognition as we watch the humans and cylons abusing each other. As Newsweek's Joshua Alston put it in a recent article about culture during the Bush Administration:


"Battlestar" has been more honest [than anti-terrorist thriller series 24] about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society's battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn't flinch from one question that "24" wouldn't dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving?

With a new president who isn't beating the "war on terror" drum, will BSG start to feel so retro that it's hard to take seriously? Will it become The Day After of our time, serious and intense when it was released but now naive and cheesy?

Why it's still relevant: BSG unflinchingly portrays the deep connection between religion and politics.
Though BSG is at its heart a show about the future politics and science, it's also about spirituality. Show creator Ron Moore has said a number of times that he thinks the mystical aspects of the Fleet's quest for a new home are crucial to the show. One of the show's most talented scientists, Gaius Baltar, has slipped between the roles of mad scientist and cult religious leader. President Roslin has quelled political uprisings and gone on religious vision quests. A lot of science fiction would shy away from the idea that religion will be as important in the future as it is in the present. And that's what will continue to make BSG relevant in the present - the power of religion isn't going away any time soon.

Why it's in the ashcan of history: Religious war is being replaced with religious tolerance.
Culture wars between Judeo-Christians and Muslims may be on the wane with Obama addressing his inaugural speech to "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers." Over the past two decades, Western pundits like Samuel Huntington have tried to claim that Muslim fundamentalism is to blame for a global "clash of civilizations" - and that in some ways, this clash caused the 9/11 attacks. Under Obama, it's possible that this civilization gap will start to close. That might mean that future audiences will be unmoved or just bored by BSG's tale of two civilizations warring over God vs. gods. If Obama makes good on his promises of religious tolerance, in eight years BSG's religious anguish and culty weirdness may look as dated as Logan's Run.

http://io9.com/5137514/is-battlestar-galactica-relevant-in-the-obama-era

The Way We Were
Art and culture in the Bush era.
NEWSWEEK Published Dec 13, 2008
By Joshua Alston

An orchestrated terrorist attack. An inexorable march to war. An enemy capable of disappearing among its targets, armed with an indifference to its own mortality. It sounds like a PBS special on Al Qaeda. In fact, it's a synopsis of the Sci Fi Channel series "Battlestar Galactica," which—for anyone who manages to get past the goofy name—captures better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world. Yes, even better than "24," with its neocon fantasies of terrorists who get chatty if Jack Bauer pokes the right pressure point. Of the two shows, "Battlestar" has been more honest about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society's battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn't flinch from one question that "24" wouldn't dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving?

"Battlestar Galactica" always finds ways to challenge the audience's beliefs—it is no more an ode to pacifism than "24" is to "bring 'em on" warmongering. In the pilot, humanity is nearly eradicated by the Cylons, a race of robots that revolt against their human creators. The only survivors are stationed on a spacecraft called Battlestar Galactica; they're spared because the ship's commander, William Adama (Edward James Olmos), had refused to relax any wartime restrictions. Adama is a hard-liner, willing to sacrifice personal freedoms in order to provide safety from an abstract threat. And he was right: the moment the human race let its guard down, the Cylons attacked. As the show unfolds, though, the survivors must constantly reflect on the price of keeping their enemies at bay, and whether it's worth paying. The show's futuristic setting—hushed and grimy, not the metallic cool of stereotypical sci-fi—helps ground the writers' ruminations in a nail-biting drama series. "Battlestar Galactica" achieves the ultimate in sci-fi: it presents a world that looks nothing like our own, and yet evokes it with chilling accuracy.

[b]http://www.newsweek.com/id/174268

[Jolie Rouge]

How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show
Jonah Goldberg
October 2009

Either you are with me, or you are my enemy!” shouted a young Darth Vader in 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, one of the execrable prequels to the original films by George Lucas.

In response to this all-or-nothing provocation, a disgusted Obi-Wan Kenobi replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!”

Siths are Jedi Knights who have given themselves over to the Dark Side by embracing the evil emotions of anger, envy, and revenge. Readers of Commentary can be forgiven for neither knowing nor caring about this. But it is worth noting that for millions of Star Wars enthusiasts, it was very serious stuff indeed. Lucas revived, if not reinvented, the entire genre of science fiction in the 1970s by embracing bold and mythic depictions of good and evil and the heroic battle of the former against the latter. For decades, the established premise of the Star Wars franchise was that the universe is divided into the Dark Side and the Light Side of the “Force.” Jedi Knights—champions of all that is noble and virtuous—were warned never to give in, even a little, to the Dark Side, lest they lose their souls. If all that is not about “absolutes,” then what on earth (or in a galaxy far, far away) is? And Lucas threw it all away to get in a dig at George W. Bush.

His swipe at Bush’s famous iteration of the doctrine that would bear his name—“You are either with us or against us”—in a few seconds unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise. Such gratuitous political self-indulgence saturated the popular culture during the Bush years, in fare that had absolutely nothing to do with the policies of the White House.

In the two (awful) sequels to The Matrix, a -science-fiction hit about humans being used as a fuel source by a world overtaken by machines, Bush is visually compared to Adolf Hitler. In the Pixar film Wall-E, the “global CEO” of an environmentally devastated Planet Earth apes Bush’s “stay the course” line. In -X-Files: I Want to Believe, Bush and J. Edgar Hoover are paired. On television, Bush hatred or liberal antiwar paranoia suffused the NBC series Law and Order like a metastasizing cancer. The hospital show Grey’s Anatomy, the attorney show Boston Legal, the cop show Bones, and even the mother-daughter show Gilmore Girls included notable and needless instances, some playful and others less so, of what Charles Krauthammer dubbed Bush Derangement Syndrome.

In most of these cases, political asides can be shrugged off. Hollywood is a very liberal place, Bush and the war were indeed very unpopular, so expecting producers and actors to escape the temptation to get their shots in would be like expecting them to treat global warming with skepticism. Denouncing the ideological intrusion into the dialogue of Grey’s Anatomy as a corruption of artistic integrity offers such televised junk more respect than it deserves. After all, few can look upon Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and wistfully ponder what might have been.

_____________


That is not the case with a cable-television series called Battlestar Galactica, a remarkable piece of work that nonetheless committed artistic and creative suicide owing to the intrusion of the political beliefs of its creator and writers, which eventually made a complete hash of their own show.

A remake of a campy 1970s science-fiction series made in the wake of the box-office receipts of the original Star Wars, the gritty, intelligent, and pensive Battlestar Galactica came as a startling surprise upon the premiere of the six-hour miniseries that began its run in 2003. The story line involves a futuristic human civilization spanning 12 planetary colonies. Robots (called Cylons) originally invented to serve as slaves evolve into sentient enemies bent on destroying their former masters. In the original series, the Cylons were depicted as fairly absurd tin men. In the new version, the evolved Cylons are human doppelgängers capable of infiltrating human society (the tin men, far more frightening this time, are still around but serve as shock troops). The doppelgängers are also essentially immortal—if one is killed, his or her consciousness is instantly transmitted into a new, identical body.

In the debut miniseries, we are introduced to a civilization very much like our own: open, decent, democratic. In fulfillment of a supposedly divine plan, the Cylons spread out among humanity’s 20 billion people, taking advantage of that openness and decency, as well as society’s boredom with military preparedness (memories of the last Cylon war have faded away). They orchestrate a 9/11 on a genocidal scale, murdering the vast majority of humanity in a perfectly timed nuclear cataclysm. An aging battlestar called Galactica—essentially a space-borne aircraft carrier—poised to become a museum exhibit narrowly escapes the -Armageddon with a tiny ragtag convoy of humanity’s survivors. Outmatched, outgunned, and outstrategized, they must all try to survive against a foe that needs no rest and has no conscience.

These premises gave Battlestar Galactica an ideal foundation to play off the headlines of the day. Indeed, as Newsweek’s Joshua Alston noted in December 2008, Battlestar Galactica captured “better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world.” The tensions between security and freedom, civilian and military leadership, healthy fear versus debilitating phobia, were explored brilliantly. The series won Program of the Year from the Television Critics Association, as well as numerous other awards. Time hailed it as the best thing on television in 2005, and the series earned a ranking in its top 100 TV shows of all time. From National Review to Rolling Stone, the series was justifiably hailed for its gritty realism, superb acting, and deft direction.

[Jolie Rouge]

Originally, the series was very difficult to pigeonhole ideologically. An avid student of martial culture, Ron Moore, its guiding creative hand, treated the military with deep respect. William Adama, Galactica’s commander, is not a coffeehouse philosophe indulging his cosmopolitan sensibilities (the way Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard often did in the second iteration of the Star Trek franchise in the 1980s), but a gruff and stalwart leader. Laura Roslin (played by Mary McDonnell) is a saccharine liberal do-gooder accidentally thrust into the position of president who achieves a flinty toughness—and makes an unexpected ideological journey of her own when she decides that abortion cannot be tolerated with the human population reduced to a mere 50,000 souls.

Inevitably and justifiably, the show dealt with various “enemy within” themes, but unlike countless rehashes of The Crucible, Battlestar Galactica conceded that there actually was an enemy within. The enemy was very real, literally an existential foe guilty of murdering 20 billion people, not just the hobgoblin of alleged McCarthyite paranoia. Peace activists are depicted, at times, as deluded, dangerous, and even vaguely traitorous, giving the impression that at least some of the writers were familiar with Orwell’s writings on wartime pacifists. And the frightening nature of the relentless suicide-bomber-attack machine was indelibly captured by the sensational concept that any Cylon killed in battle could simply be resurrected to fight another day.

Though the show received raves from writers and critics associated with the Right, Battlestar Galactica was in no way a conservative document. Numerous subplots were congenial to liberal sensibilities, as when President Roslin’s breast cancer is cured with embryonic stem cells. But hawkish arguments and assumptions were portrayed with integrity. The regrettable trade-offs implicit in any war, particularly a war to prevent total extinction, were treated as real.

_____________


The original miniseries was written and filmed in 2002, when the war on terror was a nearly universal cause. The show’s first season was written and filmed in 2003, and the second in 2004. When it came time to make the third season, in 2005, the war on terror had become old hat, and the war in Iraq had become a grinding controversy. Moore and his colleagues felt compelled to move on from their analogical portrait of the war on terror to the occupation of Iraq—a decision that upended the direction the show had been heading over the previous 32 hours and that led inexorably to its self-destruction.

The third season opens with most of humanity—exhausted by war, deprivation, and internal divisions—settling on a bleak, barely habitable planet. Suddenly the Cylons, after annihilating all but .00025 percent of humanity, decide they want to live in peace. But rather than leave humans alone, they conclude the best way to achieve this goal would be to invade this last tiny outpost of humanity and forcibly convert them to the one true god (in the series, the Cylons are monotheists, while the humans are polytheists) . . . or something.

The truth is that the audience was never given a remotely decipherable, never mind plausible, explanation for this radically bizarre and nonsensical turn of events. Rather, it was simply asserted in a hodgepodge of babbling dialogue. Almost immediately, the show’s protagonists are transformed into “insurgents” who have little or no compunction about becoming suicide bombers. The Cylons, for their part, are finding the human colony very troublesome. In one particularly ham-fisted scene, one of the Cylon leaders mocks his colleagues: “How did you think the humans would greet us? With— ‘Oh, never mind’?” This is, of course, a naked reference to the idea expressed before the American invasion, that the war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”

Most egregiously, the human suicide bombers are not young men brainwashed in a madrassa and promised eternal life with 72 virgins, nor are they threatened with the murder of their families—the tactics used by jihadists to create their human bombs. Rather, they are decent, calm, and composed men and women fighting in a noble cause. Taken seriously, this romanticization of suicide bombers and “insurgency” has a cascade of revolting implications. The insurgency in Iraq was not an authentic resistance like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or De Gaulle’s Free French forces. The ranks of terrorists in Iraq were overwhelmingly made up of Baathist remnants of the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda interlopers with their own imperialist ambitions for a worldwide umma.

The extent of the show’s political and ideological corruption is best exemplified by the fact that one of the central pillars of the series had to be yanked: the notion that the Cylons had a grand, complex, conspiratorial plan involving their human doppelgängers that was unfolding inexorably over the course of the show’s run, one that humans needed to uncover in order to secure a victory in the war for the survival of their species. Indeed, every episode of the first three seasons began with an opening sequence in which the viewer is explicitly told that the Cylons “have a plan.” But in the third season, a Cylon leader explains that “plans change,” whereupon the Cylon quest to exterminate the human race simply evaporates so the show can riff on the evils of “occupation.” By the premiere of the fourth season, the Cylon plan was no longer mentioned during the opening credits. And every other seed of plot that had been planted over the previous years was left untended and forgotten as well.

Thus, a show marked by gritty realism about how a decent but flawed civilization modeled on our own tries to cling to its decency while fighting an existential war against an implacable enemy veered wildly off course. The humans were no longer analogized to Americans; rather Americans were analogized to genocidal occupiers. In other words, we are no longer the inspiration for the futuristic Israelites trying to survive. We are now the Nazis.

With this turnabout, left-wing writers suddenly fell in love with the show. Battlestar Galactica had “morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq,” cheered a writer in the liberal American Prospect. Spencer Ackerman, then an employee of the New Republic, wrote a piece for Slate titled “Battlestar: Iraqtica—Does the hit television show support the Iraqi insurgency?” His unequivocal conclusion: “In unmistakable terms, Battlestar: Galactica is telling viewers that insurgency (like, say, the one in Iraq) might have some moral flaws, such as the whole suicide bombing thing, but is ultimately virtuous and worthy of support. Wow.” That “wow” is celebratory.

After the Iraq story line, Battlestar Galactica deteriorated rapidly over the course of its final two seasons. The plot shift led the show’s writers and producers into a bizarre and meandering world of visiting angels, pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, and deus-ex-machina literary devices. Human and Cylon fell in love; robots killed themselves; a key character’s death and resurrection were never explained; and in the end it turned out that everything we were watching had led to the population of our Earth 150,000 years ago and that we were heading in a similar direction because we have some robots now too. The disappointment among the show’s fans was palpable, and its final episode provoked widespread rage-—there is no other word for it—among those who had followed the series passionately for the previous five years and felt they had been tricked by its conclusion.

No doubt the producers believe it was all worth it. For having the “bravery” to tackle the occupation of Iraq, the producers and lead actors were invited to a panel at the United Nations to dilate on the war on terror. It is hard to imagine that would have happened if the series had held to its original course.

Ron Moore told Salon in 2007 that “the show’s mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: ‘And here’s the way to solve Iraq!’ I don’t think that’s helpful, and I don’t think that’s good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions.”

It’s been said that the difference between the truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. After its third season, Battlestar Galactica steadily failed on both counts.

These failures are attributable not just to the allure of ideology and the desire to stay “relevant” but also to Moore’s fraudulent notion that merely “asking questions” isn’t itself a form of ideological commitment. Indeed, most propaganda is often posed in the form of invidious questions. A merely loaded question—have you stopped beating your wife yet?—is one thing. An invidious question is one in which evil fictions are given parity with truth. “I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, I’m just raising important questions.”

Joshua Alston’s conclusion that Battlestar Galactica best captures the fear, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the post-9/11 world still holds up, but with a thick layer of irony. For the series’s story arc demonstrates that Moore and Company were not immune to the pressures of the post-9/11 world. Indeed, it reveals instead that they could not handle those pressures.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/printarticle.cfm/how-politics-destroyed-a-great-tv-show-15245

[Jolie Rouge]

JMHO - I never watch the show past the pilot, so I never picked up on all the suble political cues ... I just didn't like the roles of Starbuck and Boomer being made female, seemingly just so they could write in sex scenes Not to mention the blonde "hottie" Cylon ... I missed the silver robot guys with the sliding red "eye" that went 'bink... bink... bink

[Jolie Rouge]

http://www.bigbigforums.com/thats-entertainment/630216-anyone-remember-1980-s-mini-series-v.html#post96222698


'Is V Anti-Obama Propaganda?'
Nov 4, 2009

"V" exceeded many people's expectations last night, getting 13.9 million viewers and coming first among adults aged 18-49. But is the show just one big anti-Obama screed, as some have claimed?

We'll answer that question... with spoilers.

http://io9.com/5397077/is-v-anti+obama-propaganda?skyline=true&s=x


Since the article includes spoilers and vid clips ... I will let ya'll follow the link to the article rather then ruin someone's fun

[Jolie Rouge]

Zombie Obama Email: Virginia GOP Condemns Image Of President With Bullet Through Head

http://www.angryblacklady.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/virginia-halloween-mailer.jpg

WASHINGTON -- Republican Party officials in Virginia have swiftly come out against a Halloween-oriented email message from the Loudoun County GOP committee that depicts President Obama as a zombie with a bullet through his head.

As The Washington Post reports, the message was condemned by the state party and Gov. Robert McDonnell (R), who called the message "shameful and offensive." State GOP chairman Pat Mullins, according to the Post, said the party is in the process of finding those who are responsible for the image.

The Northern Virginia blog Too Conservative, which first posted the county GOP's Halloween email message on Monday, said the image of Obama crossed the line:


Like him or not he is the legitimately elected the President of the United States and Commander in Chief of our armed services in a time of war. THIS IS DISGUSTING AND SHAMEFUL.

Someone should send this to the US Secret Service.




http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/31/zombie-obama-email-virginia_n_1068128.html

[i]comments

This is shameful. It's really a sad time in our country when a political group thinks it is okay to email around an image of our president with a gun shot wound to his head. I am disgusted. This type of immature, political game playing only fuels divisivene*ss and angst. It does nothing to solve the issues. I understand political cartoon humor, and honestly if the gun shot wound was not in the side of Obama's head I would not think twice about this photo. But it is in his head and that conveys death. Perception is Reality!!! And, for those who are saying "oh people did worse things to Bush" - OK, I am sure you are right but this is not tit for tat. It would be great if all of these so-called political leaders - from left, right, and tea party whatever, would just start acting like leaders and stop acting like children.

....

The Repubs would still have a long ways to go to match the hatred of G W Bush expressed by the left.

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As usual the left can dish it out ( by the shovelfull ) but can't take it.

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As Americans we should all take a hard look at the poor taste in which we allow the media to *******ize the highest office in the land. One may not like the person in office but once you send the message that it's ok to show immages of the President of the United States of America with a bullet in his head you open a door that can never be closed again. There are those who woul respond by saying, " what's the big deal" and I would respnd with what's the point? What ever happened to upholding a standard of conduct and profession*alism that we as Americans want to be known for. Why do we so often stoop to such a low ethical bar when we can be better than that. I just wish people would go to the voting polls and let that do the talking and stop with the hate and evil banter.

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If the dems did something like this to GW Bush during his term it wouldnt be a big deal. oops they did! Wasnt a big deal then why now?

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The Republican Party can be totally satisfied that they have now turned the Office of President of the United States into a position to be mocked and held with as much esteem as some ludicrous buffoonery*. Now all future Presidents*' families can enjoy images of their loved ones with a bullet wound in their head. all the little children can be expected to mock, defile and direspect anything to do with government*.

See http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-information/522008-bds-primary-schools.html

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Spare me!! Bush was hanged at Democrat gatherings*. The leftists in Hollywood made a movie about assassinat*ing a sitting President Bush.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0853096/

[Jolie Rouge]

'Zombie Obama': A GOP group's 'disgusting' email
By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – 6 hrs ago

Virginia Republicans apologize after sending a mailer depicting the president as a zombie with a bullet hole in his head. What were they thinking?

The image: A Halloween-themed mailer from Virginia's Loudon County Republican Committee sparked bipartisan outrage this week for its gruesome rendering of President Obama as a zombie with a bullet hole in his head. (See the image at right and below.) The email, which invited supporters to the county GOP's Halloween parade, also featured undead versions of Democratic voters and Nancy Pelosi, with the tagline, "We are going to vanquish the zombies with clear thinking conservative principles and a truckload of Republican candy." The mailer has been condemned by the chairman of Virginia's Republican Party, and Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell branded it as "disgusting." The county committee has since apologized for the "Zombie Obama" image, calling it a "light-hearted attempt to inject satire humor into the Halloween holiday."

The reaction: "Have these people no sense?" says Andrew Belonsky at Death and Taxes. It's in the worst of taste, both morally and politically, to depict any politician with a gunshot wound, particularly after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was nearly killed by a bullet earlier this year. This is "too gruesome for words." I guess "I'm nearly impossible to offend," says David Wiegel at Slate. The blog that first posted this image crashed "under the weight of traffic from liberals who want to be pissed off at something," but I just don't see what the big deal is. Regardless, this "zombie madness contributes heavily to my dislike for Halloween," says Noah Rothman at Ology. "Thank God it's November."

http://news.yahoo.com/zombie-obama-gop-groups-disgusting-email-141300105.html

comments

These guys should be prosecuted, its illegal to threaten the president

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republicans = pro-zombie...

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This stuff goes to far... i AGREE. But go look up the "Take Bush OUT" sign of the left... hundreds of examples... not a PEEP "crickets" So once agaiin, what Dems thinnk is OK for them, is not for some weird reason for Repbs?? Go Figure... Huh.. Libs, being Hyper Hippos?? cant IMAGINE I esspeciially love MSNBCEEE trying to say the tea baggers were racist... they showed the sign of the Batman movie... the white face painted mock movie poster that was releast just prior to the timing of the tea baggers outings... and they said it was rasist...LOL, wasnt racest you fools, it was showing him as THE JOKER... get it, JOKER, face like the actor in the MOVIE. At least the Reps call our own out... name the last time a lib did that.((listening) a recent few come to mind: Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangle, Weiner Szchnitzel, The little freakie Asian Guy in San Fran... Wooo. Funny... none of them did it?? LOL... really??? None of them... Oh, OK! Are the LIBS really this stupid or are they just an act! I dont know anymore. Ahhh Man, Good Ol, MSNBC what a failed attempt at distorting the news.

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I guess the release of the film DURING his term about Bush getting assassinated was not a problem to these rectally inverse idiots!

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I am a registered Democrat and I'm convinced there may be a hole in the President's head but it isn't a bullet hole.

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So the Tea Party Zombies Must Die game was all good, but oh no we can't have a zombie Obama. We see right through your fake indignation, leftist media.

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I don't think Republicans understand how serious a matter the Zombies are. I don't care if a zombie is liberal, white, green, Mexican, Jewish, or President Washington. Once they turn zombie you shoot them in the head!

[Jolie Rouge]

http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-information/612903-new-york-post-chimp-cartoon-3.html


‘Obama Presidential Library’ Float Featured In Nebraska Parade Denounced as ‘Racist’
By Jason DeWitt on July 7, 2014

A float from a Nebraska Fourth of July parade over the weekend is drawing a lot of heat today.

The float featured an outhouse labeled “Obama Presidential Library” and included a mannequin of the President wearing overalls and standing next to a walker:


The Gazette @csgazette

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Br3ihm5CUAINm-R.jpg:large

Obama float at Nebraska parade sparks controversy
http://gazette.com/obama-float-at-nebraska-parade-sparks-controversy/article/1522519#WHJZ1DOs4wUqzMcM.99 …

9:32 AM - 6 Jul 2014

After the parade, critics on the Left attacked the float for being racist and disrespectful to the Presidency:


In a statement, the Nebraska Democratic Party called the float one of the “worst shows of racism and disrespect for the presidency that Nebraska has ever seen,” according to the World-Herald.

Glory Kathurima, a black woman living in Norfolk, attended the parade with her nine year-old daughter. “I’m ashamed, I’m appalled,” she said. “You see people laughing and pointing at it, smiling, looking positive about it. I immediately felt sick to my stomach…I knew what that meant, and I knew there was no sort of political statement being made by an image like that.”

But parade organizer Rick Konopasek laughed off the criticism, and said the float “was intended to be no more offensive than a political cartoon.” He pointed out that it was the most popular float in the parade and that it was even awarded an “honorable mention” prize.


“It’s obvious the majority of the community liked it,” Konopasek said. “So should we deny the 95 percent of those that liked it their rights, just for the 5 percent of people who are upset?”

Do you agree that the float crosses the line into “unacceptable” criticism of the president?

Or do you think it is well deserved considering how Obama himself has crossed the line into lawlessness on everything from Fast and Furious, to IRS-Gate to his shredding of immigration enforcement?

Let us know in the comments below.

http://toprightnews.com/?p=4309

comments

In the Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade which prides itself on being "edgy" and "political" - they did the same float featuring Bush several times. It was "hilarious" then ... but "racist" now ?

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No criticism of the president is “unacceptable.” Read the constitution, it is a protected right specifically under free speech. If the executor can’t handle the heat, step out of the hot seat.

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Excellent point, Mortinus. It’s also hard to believe that no one seems to remember how Bush was vilified by Every Single so called news agency in America. The left had NO Mercy and did and said everything they could think of to destroy him. But Bush was a class act to the end of his tenure and he still is!

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Pretty well sums up the Obama accomplishments during his term and a half and what he has managed to do to this country. If we are able by God’s grace to pull ourselves through his destruction it is basically how his presidency will be remembered. Race is not suppose to be a factor in anything (true equality) but seems to be used as a free ticket in every aspect these days….I think the smart people of his ethnicity, which would be both the white and the black race, would distance themselves from him as much as possible. Both races should unify to save their country and oust the man, prosecute him and h is cronies just as if his race didn’t matter (the only honorable thing to do at this point) and start restoring our country!

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Fair is fair,the media ,cleb.,democratslliberals,all attacked Bush without mercy for 8 years.I suppose it’s become part of the game,whether ypure black or whitePut on your big boys pants and deal with it.

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Exactly. Where do they get the raaaayyyyyycist thing. Frankly I’d have given Clinton the same treatment. Obozo deserves NO RESPECT you have to earn it. BO had a free affirmative pass from criticism his whole life. Anyone who voted for this unqualified jerk in the first place who voted for him because they thought it was “cool” to vote for him *because* “he’s black and it would be cool to have a black president” was voting based on his skin color. THEY are the rayyyyyysists. I hope every last one of them is suffering for their vote by losing their jobs.

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Dignity. really? We are laughing stock and the butt of jokes around the world thanks to the current feckless petulant man child of a POTUS! Bush II may have been a country bumpkin but this man child is a self absorbed narcissistic psychopath hell bent on lowering our standing in the world, even if it leads to a potential WWIII.



See also : http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-information/590557-you-sick-bush-bashing-yes-no-8.html

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